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If you throw away the key you still have the data but encrypted. There is no guarantee that in 5 years user data could be easily decrypted.
by merinowool 8y ago
If you throw away the key you still have the data but encrypted. There is no guarantee that in 5 years user data could be easily decrypted.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoWell, the NSA slurps all Internet traffic, so by that definition, no encrypted communication is possible.
- Thiez 8y agoBut there's no reason to believe that will be possible either. By that same reasoning it might be possible 'in 5 years' to recover the erased (and overwritten) data from the storage device, so you never can delete anything. If you use something such as AES 256, which is approved for use to encrypt 'top secret' information by the NSA, and through some miracle it turns out that we can easily decrypt such data in 5 years, then I'm pretty sure you can argue in court that you were following best practices and had no reasonable way of predicting this encryption disaster.
- sdenton4 8y ago'Key' here refers to the key in the mapping from external to internal userID. The whole point is that (as mentioned in a sibling comment) choosing an internal user ID uniformly at random is equivalent to a one-time pad; it's guaranteed non-decryptable, unless you invent a time machine...
- robbiemitchell 8y agoIsn't there a distinction here, though? While they might result in a similar outcome, deletion is different from de-identification.