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I don’t have a citation handy, but solutions such as “encrypt hthhe data and instead of deleting the data trash the key” have at least been discussed for enviro
by Xylakant 7y ago
I don’t have a citation handy, but solutions such as “encrypt hthhe data and instead of deleting the data trash the key” have at least been discussed for environments where actually deleting data is hard (event-based storage, cold long-term backups) etc.
From a technological perspective that data would be as good as deleted, even if strictly speaking it still exists.
- xorcist 7y agoOverwriting the data with random data is deleting it.
- Xylakant 7y agoThere’s no data being overwritten in the mechanism I described.
- tempestn 7y agoI believe his point is that in encrypting the data, you are overwriting it - with the encrypted version, which without the key is effectively 'random data'. It's not actually random though, so I don't agree that the data has technically been deleted. Do agree with you that it might as well have been though, so certainly should be good enough.
- Xylakant 7y agoThe idea is slightly different though: you encrypt the individuals data before it ever goes to permanent storage, backup or so. And when it’s time to delete that data, you discard the key instead, effectively making that data inaccessible.