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The good (really, the bad) news is that whatever seems to have happened, haven't really happened. No user's data is ever deleted by Google (or any other compan
by pksadiq 10y ago
The good (really, the bad) news is that whatever seems to have happened, haven't really happened.
No user's data is ever deleted by Google (or any other company) ever, even if you have deleted your account.
If you run some hosting company, you know it. You have backups and backups of backups.
Once I contacted a website who frequently SMS'd me to scrub my phone number and to not do that again.
They did it right, but after a few weeks I began receiving SMS again. Probably they ran into some issues and some of their data were restored from their backup.
Some companies could even have read-only backups so that they can have their data saved even in a massive attack.
Some developers have argued me not to ever delete user data. Just mark it is deleted, and never show it to user again. Having a way to actually delete your data may be used by some attacker to bring your service down.
- londons_explore 10y agoAt Googles scale you can be sure that if they didn't delete things they said they did they would be in big trouble. In the modern world it isn't acceptable to keep backups indefinitely. Big web companies keep backups for 14 days. When you close your account, 30 days later they delete it off the main servers, 44 days later they delete it from the backups, which might take 4 days in case of a national holiday or strike in the drive-crushing department, so 48 days.