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The company I know handles account "deletions" by pseudonymizing data, which is utter BS, any half-competent engineer can recover who the original person was. T
by zero_k 5y ago
The company I know handles account "deletions" by pseudonymizing data, which is utter BS, any half-competent engineer can recover who the original person was. The engineering lead in charge realized he can get promoted by calling pseudonymization "anonymization" thereby fooling most, and not losing the data for the company. Those who knew he was making a mess were not included in the data deletion project, likely because it was inconvenient to hear the truth.
So that's how a huge company deals with "data deletion". I hope the DPA will come down on them hard but of course this clown will then just go and do this circus at another company, now promoted to high heavens.
I hate that privacy and security are full of snake oil peddlers, and it pays of extremely handsomely to be a snake oil peddler. It's not in anyone's interest for you to get caught (who wants to advertise their security is bad/they don't abide by GDPR?), so even if it becomes painfully obvious you've been selling snake oil, you'll only be asked to hand in your resignation, allowing you to do the same (but at an even higher level) at another company.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoOne reason deletion may not be technically absolute is that tombstone records may be needed to gradually cull the data from things like backups and 3P systems. Usually though these should just be surrogate keys with no human significance. Then ultimately they get purged too.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe danger with surrogate keys and pseudonymization/tokenization is that the mere patterns in the data such as foreign key relationships may be enough to uniquely identify someone.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoIf the tombstones are barren enough there may not any/enough relations or metadata for that. And ideally even the tombstones get removed once related records and 3P copies have been wiped.