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Deleting vs. "deactivating" information?
Consider a typical social networking situation: John, a member of Site X, invites Mary to become a member. In doing so, Site X sends Mary an e-mail containing the invitation, some of whose content is provided by John.
Question 1: Should Site X retain a copy of the email's contents, particularly the part from John?
Question 2 (extra credit): Before Mary can accept John's invitation, John retracts it through some standard feature offered by Site X. Should Site X mark that invitation as "retracted", but, in doing so, retain the information that John had sent and retracted the invitation? Or should it delete all traces of the invitation ever having been sent?
Assume that Site X's actions are consistent with the site's terms and conditions, to which John and Mary agree upon joining.
When I put my privacy hat on, I know how the site should behave: keep as little as possible, and delete as much as possible. But, as the site founder/developer/whatever, I'd think that having records of the interaction between John and Mary to be legally comforting (e.g., Mary sues John for harassment, and sues Site X along the way). Or, again from that legal perspective, would I actually be better off having no record of the interaction at all? IANAL, obviously.
Thoughts?
- maxdemarzi 16y agoYou are forgetting Database back-ups. John Sends an e-mail to Mary, Database gets backed-up, John retracts e-mail. Whether you delete or retain the email information in your current records, it got saved overnight during the db back-up. If that db was a weekly or monthly backup that you keep for a year or longer, then you have it. I think it has become extremely difficult to remove all trace of our online actions. Fight for privacy, but act like you are being watched, otherwise you'll come to regret it sooner or later.
- jmiller_hn 16y agoTrue enough; good point. My concern right now is finding the right balance between (a) doing the Right Thing re privacy and (b) insuring that my site doesn't get sued out of existence because it kept (or didn't keep) some information it should (or shouldn't) have. So: If you (or someone else out there) were writing the code dealing with these parts of the site, would you preserve that information in the database, with the intent of keeping it for an arbitrarily long time, or not keep/delete it?
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoI don't know how you're set up, but when I did database backed web development back in 2001, actually deleting all of a user's information was non-trivial. It would either mess up the integrity of the database, causing unpredictable errors later, or would involve long, costly delete cascades. So when sites like Facebook just de-activate you, I just assume it's because it is a pain in the ass to actually do the delete, not that they really care that much about keeping your data around to give to the CIA later... So... I dunno, with your site, CAN you actually delete everything without it being a huge technical burden to do so?
- jmiller_hn 16y agoYet another good point; I've run into that, too. In this case, the information is relatively segmentable, so it could be deleted without causing lots of chaotic running around the database, dumping this and that.