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Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
- ffpip 6y agoOh they fully delete those? I didn't actually expect messages to be erased when we un-send it.
- shahsyed 6y agoI genuinely laughed at this - I thought the same thing! If you ever downloaded your own account data, I think OP and other concerned posters would understand how much data companies retain and this wouldn't come off as a surprise. Snapchat data for example, has chat logs, snap history, what accounts you've added/requested as a friend, and friends that have added you all retained. I bring this up as an example because the idea behind this application was to send a message that would disappear after a variable amount of time :)
- ffpip 6y agoI did download it. Before deleting my account. Just put it in a hard drive since it had all messages, photos. Time to dig into it.
- anupamchugh 6y agoAnd then run facial recognition on them? Nice way to capture our biometric data on the cloud :D
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago> "The researcher reported an issue where someone’s deleted Instagram images and messages would be included in a copy of their information (...) We’ve fixed the issue" This makes it sound like they consider "you could see it" the issue, not "we were still keeping it". In other words, the fix was to hide it, not to delete it. If I were the Irish DPA (and actually wanted to do my job and had the resources to, instead of being intentionally lazy/crippled to attract tech firm headquarters), I'd definitely be asking for retention plans and evidence that the data is now being removed in a timely manner, and start issuing fines (small ones for past transgressions, big ones if they keep doing it or don't have a decent plan how to make sure to get rid of data they shouldn't be having). For comparison: Deutsche Wohnen (large real estate) got slapped [1] with a 14.5 million EUR fine for over-retaining sensitive tenant data and not having an automated system to delete it. [1] https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2019/11/first-multi-million-gdpr-fine-in-germany-e14-5-million-for-not-having-a-proper-data-retention-schedule-in-place/ https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2019/11/first-multi-mil...
- davidhyde 6y agoWhy small fines initially? I’d like to see privacy fines being used to make lots of money like traffic fines are used today. It’s a way to tax tech companies in your jurisdiction with the added benefit of improving privacy.
- londons_explore 6y agoInitially it was almost certainly accidental, or in a system first implemented before data protection laws covered this sort of thing. From the moment the problem is brought to their attention, then it becomes intentional and willful, so the fines should be much bigger.
- jacquesm 6y agoBecause the goal is compliance, not to put companies out of business. When the laws were first enacted everybody was screaming that it was just to put companies out of business. Now they are wondering why the small initial fines. It's simple: change your ways and use the initial fines as a wake up call. If you then do not wake up and persist the fines will get heavier and heavier until you will pay attention. A Dutch hospital managed to get to the third round of fines and they weren't all that happy afterwards. 460K Euro fine for a single instance of ignoring the regulators on a single individual. Believe me when I tell you they have understood now. The initial fine was zero, just a warning to improve. The case revolved around a very minor dutch celebrity whose data was reviewed by hospital employees that should not have had that access.
- luckylion 6y ago> Because the goal is compliance, not to put companies out of business. There's middle ground between "we take 100% of your revenue" and "we take 0.001% of your revenue". Given that we're not this lenient with private citizens and small companies, why should we be with international corporations?
- jacquesm 6y ago
- Dirlewanger 6y agoWhat is not revealed is that the actual bug was that an end user found the deleted data, not that the data wasn't deleted. Should be no surprise that Instagram would have similar data retention policies as its parent company.
- searchableguy 6y ago> Pokharel discovered the bug in October last year and says it was fixed earlier this month (2020, august) Shouldn't there be fines for this? Took almost an year after being reported.
- rco8786 6y agoA fine for what? Not fixing a minor bug in a timely fashion? That’s not a road we want to travel down.
- jacquesm 6y agoThis is not a 'minor bug'. This is a major oversight and possibly a regulatory issue. The user owns the data. The user has rights.
- ffpip 6y agoInstagram doesnt use the word 'delete'. It uses 'unsent' for messages. So removed from other person's chat. Still associated with your account I have my account data from last year. Time to dig into it and sue instagram. Oh wait. I'm not in the EU. I'm in India, where they can even sell my info. So they definitely didn't delete it
- thefounder 6y agoMaybe you shouldn't share that info in the first place? Even if the provider(Instagram in this case) acts in good faith and deletes the data, 3rd parties would still own it(i.e US sec agencies, various crawlers etc)
- jermier 6y agoI want to know if the photos are securely deleted. It's not enough that the mere reference to a file is gone. I want everything overwritten with zeroes, and the photo made properly irrecoverable.
- ben509 6y agoIf you want security guarantees, find a service that makes them. Expect to pay more for the additional work it takes to deliver them.
- m4tthumphrey 6y agoIs this something you would actually expect from a media sharing/storage site?
- ben509 6y agoNot wanting data shared seems to contradict the mission of a site that shares data.
- jermier 6y agoSo what if someone sleuths around in the e-waste dept. of Instagram and steals a few hard-drives with literally Terabytes of potentially very sensitive data? That's why I would hope Instagram are encrypting data at rest with something like LUKS.
- murftown 6y agoYes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rco8786 6y agoThey are definitely not. I’m honestly surprised at how many folks here on HN (a presumably tech savvy crowd) think that Instagram (or any tech co) is “writing zeros” when a user hits a delete button.
- tdons 6y agoWe know that HN is visited by a fair share of Facebook employees. Can some of you weigh in (anonymously?) on this topic? Do you guys do hard deletes of user data instead of just soft deletes? If so, are logs or backups kept? For how long? In other words: if I'm a user of $POPULAR_SERVICE and I delete my account at time t0, is there a t1 > t0 after which every trace of my data is gone from the platform? My (cynical) guess is no, but I hope I'm wrong :)
- lend000 6y agoDELETED=TRUE
- robjan 6y agoThis is how most services work at scale. It's much cheaper to set a flag than actually delete an entry in a database. The data can then be scrubbed by some periodic maintenance process.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 6y agoOnly that doesn't typically happen. It just sits there, for years or until the company goes bust. The typical reasoning is that marketing wants to hold on to the data, they will never ever say 'ok, enough, you may delete it' because there is this infinitely small chance that they can re-activate an account, market to it for some other product (no matter that that is against the GDPR) or to sell the data to some third party if there ever is a cash crunch or panic. They see data as having positive value no matter what, whereas data that you shouldn't be holding on to is actually a liability.
- umanwizard 6y agoDo you have a source for the claim that Facebook never really deletes data, or are you just speculating?
- rco8786 6y agoSome real (understandable) ignorance about how the tech industry works in this article. There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers. The bug was showing users photos that were internally marked as deleted. Not that the photos were not in fact removed from Instagrams servers.
- victords 6y ago> There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers. No, there should be this expectation. If I have a photo of myself that I'm not comfortable being saved somewhere, there should be an expectation that when I delete this from a service, that service will actually delete it. The expectation should be that the service will do what it said, not that it hid everything very well.
- llarsson 6y agoThe GDPR and its right to be forgotten agrees with you. This is grounds for sending a strong message to Instagram for not doing what they are legally bound to doing.
- dboreham 6y agoUnfortunately this isn't how computer storahe works. This is why the military have acid baths for their disk drives.
- have_faith 6y agoIn this particular case they are actively not attempting to delete the image at all, a big difference.
- aoowii 6y agoUntrue, even on flash-based storage full deletion is possible. Here's an answer I pulled from reddit: If you are appropriately using TRIM the data will be obliterated when 'garbage collection' occurs -- forensics will not be able to recover deleted data. This is going to be largely dependent on your OS and Hardware, but if you confirm TRIM is working correctly in your setup, shortly after you permanently delete something (not recycle bin or trash) it will be gone for good. The answer is that simple. Supporting data: http://forensic.belkasoft.com/en/why-ssd-destroy-court-evidence http://forensic.belkasoft.com/en/why-ssd-destroy-court-evide... http://digitalforensicsmagazine.com/blogs/?p=271 http://digitalforensicsmagazine.com/blogs/?p=271 http://www.mcgoverngreene.com/advoedges/AE_pdfs/2011_pdfs/AE_nov-dec11.pdf http://www.mcgoverngreene.com/advoedges/AE_pdfs/2011_pdfs/AE... http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Solid_State_Drive_(SSD)_Forensics http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Solid_State_Drive_(SSD)_Fo... There's also this as a less reliable added measure: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml The main takeaway is that people vastly exaggerate how recoverable disks are, making any effort at all will stop 99.9% of hackers trying to recover data.
- jacquesm 6y agoThis sort of practice is not limited to just Instagram. Plenty of places that do soft deletes when they should be doing hard deletes. Data life-cycles are about the poorest understood subject in startup land. Ingestion is usually top notch, friction free and heavily automated. Deletion - assuming it even exists - is semi automatic or even manual, full of friction and usually incomplete or broken. You see a similar pattern with respect to signups vs account cancellation. The weird thing to me is that it is usually the marketing department and not the legal or the compliance department that has the upper hand in these data retention discussions. Fortunately thanks to the GDPR this is now changing and slowly companies are coming around on this.
- searchableguy 6y agoI have seen people giving advice to retain trial, inactive and deleted accounts for a little while so they can analyze and train their ml models in startup groups.
- jacquesm 6y agoYes, I've seen this too. Too often to be happy about. On the plus side, more and more companies we look at really get it and do their utmost best to do it right. The GDPR has definitely woken people up.
- xwdv 6y agoEveryone thinks deletion is so simple and straight forward until you start dealing with the cascading effects and edge cases.
- jacquesm 6y agoYes, especially backups and log files are hard. The databases are relatively easy if they allow for in place overwrites or compaction of tables. Even then you have to be careful. Data is funny that way. It is easy to acquire, easy to lose if you want to keep it and devilishly hard to get rid of for real if that is what you want to do.
- Hitton 6y agoFew months ago I requested my data from Discord. Interestingly enough, it didn't include my messages from server that was deleted some time before that.
- scrollaway 6y agoInternal sources at Discord confirmed to me (a few months ago, so may be outdated) that deleted messages are fully gone from the servers within hours of deletion. Deleted files hang out longer but are gone within a month.
- searchableguy 6y agoI remember seeing messages in channels that were deleted on the server so I am skeptical but it's been a long time since I requested a package. Maybe it's different for server deletion? Let me test this.
- gverrilla 6y agoDo they keep audio record?
- FridgeSeal 6y ago> When you delete something from Instagram you expect it to be gone for good Ohh do I have some bad news for you. Seemingly everyone in this industry can’t or won’t design databases and applications to actually allow for data to be deleted.
- jacquesm 6y agoAnd let's not get started on backups.
- ben509 6y agoDeletion is effectively a failure mode, and engineering tends to focus on the happy path.
- FridgeSeal 6y agoOnly if you treat it like one. Arguably a well designed system should be built to handle having certain user data deleted without interrupting or breaking anything.
- ReptileMan 6y agoAnd if they delete it faster another vocal faction will start to whine that they enable racists, sexists etc to abuse. Tomorrow at slate "How instagram permanent delete perpetuates white supremacy" There is no policy that could satisfy all.
- imgabe 6y agoI don't know how many times this is going to have to happen before people understand this: when you put something online, assume it is essentially public. Forever. If you don't want it to be public forever, don't put it online.
- gilrain 6y agoThis is victim blaming and only reinforces the status quo. The way things are isn't the way things have to be. We can change the rules if we work together. Or we can give up and blame the victims.
- searchableguy 6y agoWe should hold both companies and people accountable for their actions. I treat privacy hygiene the same as body hygiene.
- aoowii 6y agoI think it's more pragmatic advice than anything, even if all these websites deleted your data properly there'd be snapshots and pictures and backups around forever.
- jccooper 6y agoYou can have Instagram delete that photo when you change your mind, but how about the friend who saw it and saved it, or the already-illegal bot that crawled the site and archived it? "Changing the rules" can reduce data availability, probably well enough for most purposes, and that's good. But it's simply strictly true that once you publish something, you cannot assure it's unpublished. And everyone should know this and act that way.
- imgabe 6y agoDepending on other people to change their actions when you've been victimized ensures that you'll always remain a victim. You can't control what other people do. You can control what you do.
- hansvm 6y ago
- AnonHP 6y agoAnd here I am dreaming of a world where companies do real deletions of data when a user requests (and also deleting older transactional data that has outlived its utility, including regulatory requirements) and storage prices being lower with a slightly smaller (steady) market for it from the major companies. On the other hand, storage prices seem to be low enough for all these companies with bulk, long term contracts that developers wouldn’t bother doing real deletes of data.
- toast0 6y ago> storage prices being lower with a slightly smaller (steady) market for it from the major companies. I suspect that big companies in the market help justify manufacturer R&D into larger and faster and helps justify production capacity. I think we'd have smaller, slower, and slightly more expensive drives without their demand. But, speculation only.
- j45 6y agoI'm surprised Social Media networks don't convey when your data is actually 'deleted'. This approach seems a little more evident in the "archive" status on Instagram. A flag to mark data for deletion makes sense at scale.. given the number of other automated processes that run more often than a few times a year.. the user should be in control of their information and intent.
- alkonaut 6y agoData that I wanted to delete isn't necessary for the functioning of the service, so doesn't that mean the GDPR requires it to be hard-deleted within a reasonable time?
- holidayacct 6y agoWhenever someone publishes an article like this, I want them to find out what its like when you reach the threshold of 100000 individual delete requests per second which ends up being five million actual deletes when you factor in all of the associated references to the item being deleted and its metadata. Then I want them to find out what happens when you have to propagate those deletes across geographically distributed data centers, clear a geographically distribute cache and do it in a way that minimizes user facing errors and guarantees consistency. Finally you have to also ensure that deletions don't effect any business facing applications since ad revenue and metrics are all generated from certain types of data. These people imagine you just rm -rf a file and run a few SQL queries, you literally can't just delete data. I've worked at the scale of Instagram before. Literally nothing works like that at that scale, the person who wrote that article should have called up someone from Instagram and had them explain at a really high level how complicated deleting data is at large scale.
- jacquesm 6y agoI find it very interesting that given a chance to hover up a billion records we see no technical challenge at all but when asked to get rid of them suddenly you're demanding unobtanium. If you can't reliably get rid of the data you administer, don't collect it in the first place.
- justwalt 6y agoI’m hesitant to think they just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Giving that company the benefit if the doubt seems like a bad idea.
- GoodJokes 6y agoWhenever someone writes a comment like this complaining that something is too hard I always want to remind them that that isn’t an excuse.
- kuschku 6y agoThey've got 30 days to delete data, there's no excuse not to manage it within 30 days. Also, you're saying they intentionally built a software stack without even thinking about how to obey the law (the 30-day deletion requirement existed even before the GDPR, since 1996 even, just with lower fines) I hope in a few years this case will be taught in school just like the Therac case is being taught right now.
- yalogin 6y agoI assume all companies except may be Apple and google never delete the data even if they provide the delete option. For example, I still keep getting emails from mint saying that my credit score has changed even though I deleted all my info from my account.
- BishamonSr 6y agoIsn't that something. Looks like we can't get rid of our past.
- mtnGoat 6y agoBased on the conversation here, it would seem like deleting data is an unsolved problem in CS, or some of you just make it overly complex. Every system I have built had deletes, because it is the right thing to do... No team I've been on got away with not doing the right thing because it was hard. We put our heads down and got it done. Smh. Some of the engineers at these companies forgot their morals as soon as something got hard I guess.
- aspenmayer 6y agoOk. I need help recovering photos on Instagram