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While I'd love to say I sympathise, I do not. The end goal is not to make life easy for small businesses. The end goal is protecting the consumer. All your rem

by exergy 8y ago

While I'd love to say I sympathise, I do not. The end goal is not to make life easy for small businesses. The end goal is protecting the consumer. All your remaining points seem more easily solved than the backup bit, but I do not understand what could be so hard about deleting a user from a backup. Perhaps I'm dumb, but just go in there and delete it retroactively? If it affects other users, that's ok. They see a [deleted] a la Reddit. You're not responsible for ensuring the API partners are in compliance. Those companies should have to fend for themselves. When you delete everything you stored about a user, you also delete all potential personally identifiable information, so I again do not see what the problem is. It just sounds like a bit of whining from where I am standing. It's like a small bridge builder saying "but the standards are too damn hard!". We start with the end goal of safe Bridges and safe users and then go backwards. Not the other way around.

Matt3o12_ 8y ago
One problem with backups is that you don’t want them to be always online (store them offline and off site for disaster recovery). Backups can also be helpful in case of bugs that delete your whole database so that you can recover the data after the bug is fixed. Imagine the follow query `delete from users where id = 372936 or status = inactive`. Unfortunately, due to a bug, all users have been marked as inactive. Now you destroyed the whole database. No problem you think, just restore it from a backup. Due to the new law, this script ran also on your backup. Congratulations, you have now lost all your users. Hence, you never want to “change” backups. You only ever want to restore from them. The easiest way to comply with it would be have a list with all user deletion requests stored somewhere else and every time you restore from a backup, you also apply this list from the backup. But have you really deleted users if you keep backups?
- exergy 8y ago
  It's not a shell script that you will write each time a user asks for a deletion though, would it? It will be a carefully tested and automated procedure. It certainly sounds like the possibility of deleting all your users might actually make us all more careful, less gun-slinging, shoot-from-the-hip programmers.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    If backups are now live data you need to backup the backups. What happens if the procedure bugs out? It’s backups and scripts all the way down.
  - Matt3o12_ 8y ago
    It will probably be an SQL query and if software development has thought us anything is that testing is not enough. Proper testing can be very helpful and prevent many errors but it can never prevent all because you just cannot test for all circumstances. This is why backups are helpful and why backups should not be changeable. It is a reason why backups were made on magnetic tab back in the day so it wouldn’t be overridden by mistake. Backups were just as important back when programming wasn’t all about that fast iterating and push updates and fix later – or gun-slinging programming as you call it – as they are now.
zapita 8y ago
> While I'd love to say I sympathise, I do not. The end goal is not to make life easy for small businesses. The end goal is protecting the consumer. I understand your sentiment, but I think dismissing the issue of barrier to entries for small businesses is very shortsighted. Remember that excessive consolidation in the Internet industry is what led to the wholesale violation of consumer's privacy in the first place. So enforcing stricter data handling rules and protecting small businesses's ability to compete are two sides of the same coin. To truly protect consumers in the long run, regulators need to address both issues in a comprehensive way.
- exergy 8y ago
  How would you propose we do both simultaneously, though? All else being equal, I'd very much want to have both. I try to avoid big companies in all kinds of walks of life. But if I have to choose between the two options, I'd very much choose the GDPR way.
  - zapita 8y ago
    I personally am not competent enough in this field to propose changes to GDPR that would better balance these constraints. Which is why it's so important that regulators attack the problem in a holistic way - they are the only ones with the mandate, resources and expertise to do so. If GDPR in its current form makes it harder for small businesses to compete, in my opinion that makes GDPR incomplete, and we should pressure regulators to keep improving it. To achieve that, the first step is for us as a community to agree on the scope of the problem, which is why I'm trying to convince you :-)
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> All your remaining points seem more easily solved than the backup bit, but I do not understand what could be so hard about deleting a user from a backup. Perhaps I'm dumb, but just go in there and delete it retroactively? I do backups for a living. I do them on tape, every day, and then once a month a trucks takes them to a dedicated safe. 6 backups are incremental, one is full. Please explain it to me how I'm going to delete one single user. Thank you.
- chopin 8y ago
  You don't keep the backup forever. GDPR forces you to reasonable measures for deletion. You could also keep a record of "to-delete" primary keys in event of a restore along with your backups. All of this should have been implemented a long time ago, some European countries demanded this already. I am surprised by the lack of imagination of people if they don't want to implement something (too burdensome, technically impossible,...) who can come up with decent solutions if it fits them. A little anecdote for this: Recently I wanted to buy some insurance. The insurance company demanded wide leeway in handling personal data which by law (in Germany) has to be opt-in. I returned the paperwork, explicitly stating that I do not consent to use of the data beyond what is strictly necessary for the contract. I was told that contract can be made only with consent and that I could revoke consent later (the latter is mandated by law. What a bull-shit show. I am looking forward to GDPR coming into effect to give these businesses a middle-finger.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    It's not impossible, it's just terribly complicates very simple things. No image back ups. No incremental image backups. No incremental backups of the DB. No backup od DB dumps. You need to reorganize everything, and in this case it complicates things a lot. For small and middle-size companies dealing with a lot of customer data (like hospitality industry), this is a major headache. And we do keep our records very well.
FridgeSeal 8y ago
I agree completely. Want to hoover up all available data, well then you'd better go to great lengths keeping it safe. Find yourself holding data that you now need to do something about? Delete it, unless it's business critical. I really don't buy into this idea that the backups thing is that hard of a problem: if you're a startup, you'd design your infrastructure from the ground up with GDPR in mind which is going to put you in front of the competition and incumbents. Is it really, really, really that hard to have something that deletes stuff from backups? How long are we planning to keep backups anyways? Surely, when a user requests their data to be deleted it can be deleted from the main production database. Then when that db is backed up it'll overwrite previous versions (this new update then replicated out to other places) and just like that you've successfully (and easily) removed all applicable user data from all current db's and backups...

by exergy 8y ago

Matt3o12_ 8y ago

One problem with backups is that you don’t want them to be always online (store them offline and off site for disaster recovery). Backups can also be helpful in case of bugs that delete your whole database so that you can recover the data after the bug is fixed. Imagine the follow query `delete from users where id = 372936 or status = inactive`. Unfortunately, due to a bug, all users have been marked as inactive. Now you destroyed the whole database. No problem you think, just restore it from a backup. Due to the new law, this script ran also on your backup. Congratulations, you have now lost all your users. Hence, you never want to “change” backups. You only ever want to restore from them. The easiest way to comply with it would be have a list with all user deletion requests stored somewhere else and every time you restore from a backup, you also apply this list from the backup. But have you really deleted users if you keep backups?

exergy 8y ago
It's not a shell script that you will write each time a user asks for a deletion though, would it? It will be a carefully tested and automated procedure. It certainly sounds like the possibility of deleting all your users might actually make us all more careful, less gun-slinging, shoot-from-the-hip programmers.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  If backups are now live data you need to backup the backups. What happens if the procedure bugs out? It’s backups and scripts all the way down.
- Matt3o12_ 8y ago
  It will probably be an SQL query and if software development has thought us anything is that testing is not enough. Proper testing can be very helpful and prevent many errors but it can never prevent all because you just cannot test for all circumstances. This is why backups are helpful and why backups should not be changeable. It is a reason why backups were made on magnetic tab back in the day so it wouldn’t be overridden by mistake. Backups were just as important back when programming wasn’t all about that fast iterating and push updates and fix later – or gun-slinging programming as you call it – as they are now.

zapita 8y ago

> While I'd love to say I sympathise, I do not. The end goal is not to make life easy for small businesses. The end goal is protecting the consumer. I understand your sentiment, but I think dismissing the issue of barrier to entries for small businesses is very shortsighted. Remember that excessive consolidation in the Internet industry is what led to the wholesale violation of consumer's privacy in the first place. So enforcing stricter data handling rules and protecting small businesses's ability to compete are two sides of the same coin. To truly protect consumers in the long run, regulators need to address both issues in a comprehensive way.

exergy 8y ago
How would you propose we do both simultaneously, though? All else being equal, I'd very much want to have both. I try to avoid big companies in all kinds of walks of life. But if I have to choose between the two options, I'd very much choose the GDPR way.
- zapita 8y ago
  I personally am not competent enough in this field to propose changes to GDPR that would better balance these constraints. Which is why it's so important that regulators attack the problem in a holistic way - they are the only ones with the mandate, resources and expertise to do so. If GDPR in its current form makes it harder for small businesses to compete, in my opinion that makes GDPR incomplete, and we should pressure regulators to keep improving it. To achieve that, the first step is for us as a community to agree on the scope of the problem, which is why I'm trying to convince you :-)

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> All your remaining points seem more easily solved than the backup bit, but I do not understand what could be so hard about deleting a user from a backup. Perhaps I'm dumb, but just go in there and delete it retroactively? I do backups for a living. I do them on tape, every day, and then once a month a trucks takes them to a dedicated safe. 6 backups are incremental, one is full. Please explain it to me how I'm going to delete one single user. Thank you.

chopin 8y ago
You don't keep the backup forever. GDPR forces you to reasonable measures for deletion. You could also keep a record of "to-delete" primary keys in event of a restore along with your backups. All of this should have been implemented a long time ago, some European countries demanded this already. I am surprised by the lack of imagination of people if they don't want to implement something (too burdensome, technically impossible,...) who can come up with decent solutions if it fits them. A little anecdote for this: Recently I wanted to buy some insurance. The insurance company demanded wide leeway in handling personal data which by law (in Germany) has to be opt-in. I returned the paperwork, explicitly stating that I do not consent to use of the data beyond what is strictly necessary for the contract. I was told that contract can be made only with consent and that I could revoke consent later (the latter is mandated by law. What a bull-shit show. I am looking forward to GDPR coming into effect to give these businesses a middle-finger.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  It's not impossible, it's just terribly complicates very simple things. No image back ups. No incremental image backups. No incremental backups of the DB. No backup od DB dumps. You need to reorganize everything, and in this case it complicates things a lot. For small and middle-size companies dealing with a lot of customer data (like hospitality industry), this is a major headache. And we do keep our records very well.

FridgeSeal 8y ago

I agree completely. Want to hoover up all available data, well then you'd better go to great lengths keeping it safe. Find yourself holding data that you now need to do something about? Delete it, unless it's business critical. I really don't buy into this idea that the backups thing is that hard of a problem: if you're a startup, you'd design your infrastructure from the ground up with GDPR in mind which is going to put you in front of the competition and incumbents. Is it really, really, really that hard to have something that deletes stuff from backups? How long are we planning to keep backups anyways? Surely, when a user requests their data to be deleted it can be deleted from the main production database. Then when that db is backed up it'll overwrite previous versions (this new update then replicated out to other places) and just like that you've successfully (and easily) removed all applicable user data from all current db's and backups...