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Yeah, immutability doesn’t seem desirable in a world with GDPR and the right to be forgotten, which requires you to support deletion.
by dybber 6y ago
Yeah, immutability doesn’t seem desirable in a world with GDPR and the right to be forgotten, which requires you to support deletion.
- coddle-hark 6y agoI really don’t get why GDPR gets dragged up every time someone mentions immutable data stores; was everyone really building append-only systems before 2018?
- breakfastduck 6y agoIt's because GDPR made things a law, not just a best practice. It does need to be considered, and it's worth making sure people remember it.
- fanf2 6y agoIt has been a legal requirement in the UK that databases must be able to delete personal data since the data protection act 1984 - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/35/enacted https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/35/enacted - in particular see the data protection principles in schedule 1: the 6th principle requires that data is retained no longer than necessary. There are provisions elsewhere in the act that can require a data holder to delete data. Most of GDPR is not really new. There was a significant amount of teaching about data protection when I was at university in 1994-1997 and it wasn’t even new then.
- nlitened 6y agoDatabase immutability does not mean it's impossible to delete content. It means you separate two use cases: retracting information (I remove an item from my shopping cart because I want another item) and purging data (I delete my account and all my shopping history because I don't want the shop to store my data anymore). You can still purge data easily in Datomic, for example.