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You can do a soft delete, setting a flag (expire date), have apps ignore records with an expire date then a scheduled job to delete all items with the expire da

You can do a soft delete, setting a flag (expire date), have apps ignore records with an expire date then a scheduled job to delete all items with the expire date set with a value less than current time. Alternatively move the deleted data to a temporary location and then delete the temporary location after a short period of time. Or better combine both patterns where expired rows get moved to a temporary location before hard deleting a period of time after. GDPR says you have to delete data when requested. As far as I know you have 30 days to acknowledge the request and up to 60 days to action the request. It’d be completely reasonable to do a soft delete for 7-14 days before doing a hard delete to prevent these kind of errors.

kgeist 4y ago
That's exactly what we do: a soft delete followed by a scheduled hard delete 7 days later. The customer is also notified that they won't be able to restore their account after that. Soft deletes are usually automatic and well-tested (for example, a subscription expired) but sometimes there are requests by management or customers to delete accounts manually and this approach really helped avoid disastrous situations like the one at Atlassian because you have a whole week to realize you deleted the wrong accounts (customers will most likely complain much sooner). Yes, GDPR has a grace period of 30 days or so, it's never been a problem in practice.