7 ms·
> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I belie
by dividuum 9y ago
> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space.
No reason to believe. You can read about the storage architecture used to store photos from a post in 2009 here: https://code.facebook.com/posts/685565858139515/needle-in-a-haystack-efficient-storage-of-billions-of-photos/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/685565858139515/needle-in-a-.... Obviously that might and probably has changed since, but at least at some point that was exactly true.
Quote:
"The delete operation is simple – it marks the needle in the haystack store as deleted by setting a “deleted” bit in the flags field of the needle. However, the associated index record is not modified in any way so an application could end up referencing a deleted needle. A read operation for such a needle will see the “deleted” flag and fail the operation with an appropriate error. The space of a deleted needle is not reclaimed in any way. The only way to reclaim space from deleted needles is to compact the haystack (see below)."
- raverbashing 9y agoSo, like a filesystem more or less I might just "help" them by uploading more data I guess
- mistermann 9y agoA browser addin to help with this helping might help make the world a better place.
- halflings 9y agoBanning accounts using this add-on (breach of ToS) would be a formality for facebook, if this was to become an issue in the first place. (unlikely that a sufficient number of people will bother doing this)
- raverbashing 9y agoSo, it's ok if people die for their growth, but not use a browser extension At this time, what's the loss in being banned?
- untog 9y agoFile systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
- gschier 9y ago> unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes? Hehe, you mean, like... Facebook? They respect advertisers with money, not users.
- TomV1971 9y agoI assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way. For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier. Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index. And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.
- dalore 9y agoNot standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect. - disk space is cheap - deletes are expensive (time) and slow - deletes are harder to scale - can't revert a real delete - delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture - append only data is better, more durable I could go on.
- untog 9y agoPlacing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".
- dalore 9y agoNot at all. All my reasons were technical in that events are part of a stream, and delete is just one more event. When you reconstruct the stream, the end product is the item is deleted. But you could recreate the item from the stream so technically not deleted. Companies that take daily backups. Say a user asked to delete something, do they now go through and comb through their backups (which might even be offsite or in cold storage) and delete it? It's essentially the same thing.
- droidist2 9y agoWhat video would you upload? Just nonsense? Is this to become the modern equivalent of a "black fax"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax
- noobermin 9y agoAllow me to ask the obvious question. Who doesn't do the something like this? Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?
- scottmf 9y agoSnapchat claims to. And after the trouble they once got into for not deleting media after it was viewed, I believe them. https://www.snap.com/en-GB/privacy/privacy-policy/ https://www.snap.com/en-GB/privacy/privacy-policy/
- duck 9y agoWhy would you believe them after they have lied to you once already?
- murukesh_s 9y agoRight, I wonder how much people trust American companies. Imagine a Chinese firm doing the same and how many will trust them again..
- floatingatoll 9y agoChinese firms are generally required under threat of arrest to store and/or transmit all data on users. A single Chinese firm failing to delete data would have little or no negative impact within China given that they’re probably already secretly required to do exactly this. Do you mean US customer impact?
- stjohnswarts 9y agoIt is best to never have any Chinese company store your data. They are by law (and under severe penalties) required to make all data in their possession available to government officials at any time that it is requested. Dictatorships are like that.
- 9y ago
- dorgo 9y agoThe database we use (Vertica) works this way. Nothing is deleted. Instead it is flagged as deleted. A background task may purge old data (older than x). Historical queries show the database state as it was days or weeks ago. If the background task is broken (bug?) then the data stays indefinitelly on disk.