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I think one of the unintended consequences of privacy legislation is it will support the burning the library of Alexandria over and over again. The default cor
by narrator 7y ago
I think one of the unintended consequences of privacy legislation is it will support the burning the library of Alexandria over and over again.
The default corporate posture will be : Delete all the data! It's a liability and figuring out what we can keep is an enormous headache.
- rkagerer 7y agoWell, to some degree it is a liability. It just took this long and some accidents for them to finally figure it out. That attitude will create a problem - a.k.a. opportunity - for others to come in and solve. Google got rich by scraping the internet and solving the headache of how to find decent content. If there's value in some of this data headed to the dump, it gives a chance for someone to do the same. Who knows, they might even find a way to do in a privacy-respecting manner.
- naniwaduni 7y agoThis particularly consequence was so clearly predictable that it's hard to call it unintentional. It's a hard-to-avoid trade-off. Jury's out on whether it was the right one.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoNote that "deleting" is problematic in itself, especially for "cloud" data, considering how storage works, especially transistor one like SSD's !
- anticensor 7y agoMark it inaccessible and write the new data over it in the next write cycle.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoThat doesn't work on SSDs, and the data might be even theoretically recoverable on HDDs : https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12503/can-wiped-ssd-data-be-recovered https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12503/can-wiped... > Therefore, you should assume there is no reliable way to securely erase individual files on a SSD; you need to sanitize the whole drive, as an entire unit. There's a reason why when security is deemed important, the storage is physically destroyed instead.
- anticensor 7y agoI meant for the sake of data protection, not for forensics. You start with all ones and gradually deplete your ability to write ones over time in electron charge memories such as SSDs.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoThis is not about companies following best practices but about what is going to happen when some of the supposedly deleted data pops up again, as it eventually will. Will a judge that is clueless about how computers really work consider that as a GDPR violation or not ? As deliberate or not ?
- anticensor 7y agoIf you disable wear levelling, you could force it to end in a final all-zeros state.