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Nope. Not even a little bit. The Right to Erasure is way overblown. Even in situations where a data subject can request it (which isn't all of them), a Control
by lmkg 7y ago
Nope. Not even a little bit. The Right to Erasure is way overblown.
Even in situations where a data subject can request it (which isn't all of them), a Controller can choose not to delete any data where they have an Overriding Legitimate Interest. That's legalese for "a pretty good reason," as long as the privacy interests of the data subject are taken into account. Fraud detection is explicitly listed as an example of Overriding Legitimate Interest.
I'm not aware of any court action confirming this, but the general sentiment is that "altering back-ups is a terrible idea" is a valid Overriding Legitimate Interest, so long as you make sure that you can re-erase the data subject's data after restoring from back-up. The data subject's privacy interests are generally satisfied because the back-ups are not used for processing.
Other considerations like data minimization still apply, so even if you have Overriding Legitimate Interest for some data that doesn't give you carte blanche to horde all data. But things like logs (with a sane retention policy), back-ups (with a re-erasure process), and trained ML models are generally allowed to keep remnants of your data around.
- Silhouette 7y agoThat seems a very generous interpretation. The wording about overriding legitimate interests is specifically in the case of erasure because a data subject objects to processing. It doesn't cover any of the other cases where erasure is required, any one of which is sufficient. One of those is "the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed" and another is "the data subject withdraws consent on which the processing is based according to [cross-references] and where there is no other legal ground for the processing". There may be legitimate interests in things like maintaining logs and back-ups, but it would be quite a stretch to argue that an organisation with the resources of Facebook and the potential amount and sensitivity of personal data Facebook are dealing with can't manage to delete the underlying data in as long as 3 months.
- derekp7 7y agoIs it even possible to delete something from the middle of a tape (assuming tape backups are used)? The only thing that can be done is to read the tape in, transfer all "good" data to another tape, then erase the original tape.
- Silhouette 7y agoThat's the sort of question that makes the GDPR regrettably ambiguous. It uses a lot of words like "legitimate", "undue" and "reasonable", but there could be genuine uncertainty about how those would apply in quite a lot of practical, everyday situations. In this situation, however, we are talking about an organisation whose entire business model is built on personal data given by literally billions of people over a period of many years, with tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions in revenues, which is operating on a scale where it is demonstrably capable of designing and building replacements to its own specifications for standard infrastructure and deploying them throughout its own data centres. I don't think it would have much credibility if it claimed it couldn't guarantee to comply sooner than three months after a request because it regularly backs up possibly the largest database in the world on magnetic tape.
- jkaplowitz 7y agoIn a conceptual rather than literal sense, yes it's possible to do this in certain cases. In particular, if the per-account bits of the backups are encrypted with per-account keys, deleting an account's key makes that account's bits of the backups unrecoverable.
- cameronbrown 7y agoI believe Facebook uses Blu-rays and regular HDDs for cold storage, not tape. https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold-storage-data-center/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...