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I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth: * accounts are never deleted, period * At most there's a column in the table which specifies
by itvision 5y ago
I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth:
* accounts are never deleted, period *
At most there's a column in the table which specifies whether the account is alive or not. That's it.
- bombcar 5y agoConfluence even explicitly does this - you can do a “gdpr delete” which disables the user and replaces all info with random strings. It’s kind of hilarious.
- naoqj 5y agoI remember a service that I used 10 years ago that would do something like that. You would request to delete your account but it wouldn't work well as you stayed logged in; if you looked at your account panel most of your info was changed to random strings, including your email.
- organsnyder 5y agoAs long as all PII is purged in this process (tricky to guarantee with software like Confluence that is entirely dedicated to hosting user-generated data), that could be compliant.
- Nextgrid 5y agoTechnically the foreign key relationships could themselves be considered identifying data.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoHow do you mean?
- Nextgrid 5y agoLet’s imagine you’re a modern bank and associate card transactions with the merchant. Even if you sanitize/delete the account holder record, you can’t delete the transactions themselves (as it would screw up your accounting) nor the merchant association. Now let’s say you have a very particular customer that always goes to a very specific restaurant at pretty much the same time every day consistently. That pattern alone is enough to single out that particular person (and deanonymize them by correlating with other records such as cell phone location data, etc).
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y agoIs this based on your interpretation of GDPR, or legal precedent?
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe former - my understanding is that anything that can be used to identify a user is considered personal data, so even things that would be benign/meaningless in isolation would count if they produce a unique enough signal when aggregated.
- michaelt 5y agoGiven that 99% of GDPR stuff goes unenforced, presumably it's the former. If you understand the GDPR exclusively based on legal precedent, you'd probably conclude the GDPR doesn't exist.
- barrkel 5y agoGDPR creates a legal liability. It's less about enforcement and more about litigation risk.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe risk is very minimal or non-existent in the current situation though. Maybe once Google or Facebook is properly fined (with those 4% fines everyone was fear-mongering about) then you'll have to reevaluate, but given how it's gone so far I can't see that happening ever.
- warmwaffles 5y agoI wonder if they also go through all of their backups and purge the PII. I would be willing to bet, they don't.
- hobs 5y agoNot required by the GDPR... so they will not.
- c0balt 5y agoBackups usually have limited retention after various data protection agencies. In my current location the recommended time is a few weeks for backups, a few days for logs etc. Those agencies are fully aware that nobody goes around purging data from backups (which may also be hard with airgapped backups etc.) and you might need to wait before being "forgotten".
- DelightOne 5y agoAre they allowed to restore the account from backup if the user asks for the reopening of the account?
- hvidgaard 5y agoYou only need to state to what extend and period the information is stored in backups, and have a process in place to purge it again in case of a restore.
- warmwaffles 5y agoI never realized that was the rule. I thought you had to go in and wipe the backups regularly.
- hvidgaard 5y agoThat would be infeasible for cold storage.
- organsnyder 5y agoThat's illegal under the GDPR and many other privacy laws and is subject to heavy fines if caught. I work in privacy at a large tech company, and we take this stuff extremely seriously.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe heavy fines everyone is fear-no getting about are a running joke now. It took 4 years and a non-profit making lots of noise for a brazen, obvious and malicious GDPR breach to be investigated despite it being plastered on every single website out there (I’m talking about non-compliant consent popups). To date, the accumulated fine amount over the 4 years and all fined companies is around a billion. Now lookup the profit that just one top adtech vendor makes in a year. The spirit of the GDPR is great but its enforcement is severely lacking.
- karaterobot 5y agoYep. And you can extend that to all security compliance, not just GDPR. The biggest driver for compliance is being able to give solid answers on VSA questionnaires, not actually being secure. Certainly not fear of getting fined or failing an audit. The number of companies who get caught is so small, and the amount they get dinged for is so minuscule that it's not even a concern for them once they figure out how it works.
- DelightOne 5y agoWhen the enforcing agency works against it, its harder to effect change. Do many companies change their ways due to GDPR though? Not having too many fines may also be a testament to compliance kicking in before fines are necessary. I think the system improved the web as a whole for EU with new options for consumers despite.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoHow does the law relate to backups? What about reports run in the past and possibly saved on someone’s local drive?
- EdwardDiego 5y agoYou can create a special deleted user account, and that claims ownership of FK relations that would break things. But then a lot of relational datastores aimed at Big Data (tm, rights reserved, patent pending) don't do super well at updates.
- fathyb 5y agoGitHub does that for comments with the Ghost user [0] for example [0] https://github.com/ghost https://github.com/ghost
- alasdair_ 5y agoI worked for a company that made games that were used by young children and so covered by COPA. They definitely took a lot of care to delete everything.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoHow are backups dealt with in this scenario?
- d2wa 5y agoThe practice developed around the GDPR looks something like this: You keep a separate record of deleted accounts. If you ever need to use or restore from backups, you need to filter the import or other use against that list. You can only do data-integrity checks against the backups and not use it for any purpose, of course. You must notify your local data protection authority if there are any exceptions. Like, if you restored a backup but you can't guarantee that deleted accounts remains deleted. In other words, you don't need to wipe backups but you can't use them without processes in place to ensure you comply with your customers' rights granted under the GDPR.
- bluehatbrit 5y agoHow does this line up with something like a data breach of a backup?
- Sayrus 5y agoIn this case, you would still leak the data you had on the user. In France, according to the CNIL's recommendation, you can keep users' data in backups but you have to notify in clear words them that their data is kept X years. As a side note, the CNIL also clarified things the author have issues with, for instance "without undue delay" is set to 30 days. In the UK, I've read they backups for specific users must be deleted when technically possible. I'm not sure how that works in practice.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
- jack335 5y agoThat's true. But * probably * pseudonymised :D
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danielskogly 5y agoWhen a user requests deletion from my wishlist service, I fully delete everything, not only to be GDPR-compliant, but because it's the right thing to do. This includes: - Their account changes and passports - Their own wishlists, including all items added - Any claims they've made on other wishlists - Any item suggestions they've added to other wishlists - The checked status of any item suggestions they've checked on other wishlists - Removing them as partners on collaborative wishlists created by others - The user I'm not sure why someone would _want_ to keep user data around, as that seems more of a liability than an asset.
- efdee 5y agoBut that's the easy part. What about your backups?
- danielskogly 5y agoHeroku keeps 7 days of automatic backups, and to the best of my knowledge they are deleted after this.
- onion2k 5y agoThat was true until the GDPR made it not true.
- null_object 5y ago> accounts are never deleted, period Want to just add my voice to others who’ve already said this isn’t true. I work at a company where the task to ensure that every last shred of a person’s data is deleted when they leave the service took a whole team more than a year to develop. It includes all backups and databases, and is complete shortly after 45 days have elapsed (which is in our T&C to ensure that users have enough time to migrate their data, or even reverse their decision).
- Fiahil 5y agoI also worked for companies where this isn't true. Some projects to setup Data Science / AI Pipelines for a few large companies. Not only they do delete everything upon request and it's effective after a given number of days ; but they also made sure we correctly updated a person's consent in the middle of a marketing campaign if they _withdrew_ it. They could occasionally get an additional text or email if they sent their withdrawal after they were drafted in the current batch, but that's about it. It was disclosed to the customer as well. Some do care about this stuff.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoDelete data first then delete accounts.
- jeffwask 5y agoThis is a bit too absolute but I too have worked for SAAS companies who told people things were deleted when they were soft deleted or not deleted at all.
- fastball 5y agoAdmittedly we're a two-person startup so not exactly the same as a big corporate, but at Supernotes[1] we actually delete you from the database when you delete your account. [1] https://supernotes.app https://supernotes.app
- dboreham 5y agoOk, we all understand the idea of a tombstone (a "deleted" field in the record that is set on deletion). However, the article actually describes something much worse -- user deletes their account and subsequently the account is still active. Not "marked deleted but some data is still on the disk" but rather "completely active, works, can still log in". This is surprising to me. I would not expect to see that really ever. But the article claims that this occurred in some significant number of their tests. Not sure how to interpret that.
- chitza 5y agoAt the company I work for we actually hard-delete all user/tenant data, when requested. The column you mention is used for soft-deletion, which is a transient state. Even when not explicitly requested by the customer, we still hard-delete soft-deleted data that has been stale for at least X months (6?). So yeah, some companies really delete customer data, by request or by policy.