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I remember a while back when there was some commotion about Google not necessarily deleting your emails even when you delete them off Gmail. What they did was t

• dredmorbius 15y ago
  Read James Fallows "Hacked" article in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8... Though the hacker who attacked his wife's account deleted all mail, Google were able to restore the messages -- first the current year's mails, and eventually the full history of the account. This implies that, though deleted, the data persisted on Google's systems. This is actually a really good system design (most data destruction is accidental deletion by a user, not hacking, and a robust recovery system is a feature). It does raise certain troubling questions, and it would behoove Google (and any other SAAS service provider) to establish a clear policy as to what the grace period during which deleted data may be recovered is. I've had my own experience where, shall we say, legal obligations made it expedient to remove certain content from our systems. Use of a CDN and extensive caching means that there's no longer a single point of existence for any given piece of data, and explicitly flushing large volumes of content from our systems was, if not horrendously complex at least non-trivial.