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This is a great idea! In practice, how would you go about this e.g. if you're using Stripe? After a few weeks, delete the customer information in Stripe?
by shafyy 4y ago
This is a great idea! In practice, how would you go about this e.g. if you're using Stripe? After a few weeks, delete the customer information in Stripe?
- Bilal_io 4y agoThat's a very good question. I wonder why companies don't push hard to disallow third-party services from storing their customers' data. I had this issue as an employe. My employer used a third-party service for onboarding. This service had a breach and my data (including my SSN) was leaked. I've been begging my employer (one reason I wish I lived in California) to take action and have them remove my data, because another breach is inevitable. They've finally sent a request to delete all employees' data. Now I am waiting.
- shafyy 4y agoIf you accept payment, it's very hard not to relay some information to a third party, except if you build your own payment provider service... But I'd love to see Stripe make more effort here and e.g. start allowing EU hosting for EU customers and so on.
- Bilal_io 4y agoI don't mind sending data to the service, but the moment the information is no longer needed, we should have the expectation that you delete the data.
- londons_explore 4y agoEven if you delete it in Stripe, I very much doubt that stripe or the credit card providers will be deleting the data. Someone will know that Mr Smith has a mulvad VPN subscription. They just won't know his username on the service.
- shafyy 4y agoProbably true. So, how does Mullvad handle this?
- acallaghan 4y agoI suspect a temporary ID that links the two that lives for just the time of the Payment Request and transmitted as metadata? Once the payment is successful, it removes the ID linking the payment to the account ID & severs the link - just the account has the credit
- ignoramous 4y agoI've done something similar to disassociate customer-ids from their logs. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenization_(data_security) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenization_(data_security) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding
- jeromegv 4y agoHandle what? Of course someone can go to Stripe and get that info, but as OP just said, they won't be able to tie it to a specific VPN account as that link is now broken. They also mentioned it's about less data, not about zero data. The moment you use a credit card, of course it's stored in a bunch of places. But this won't be stored with them.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoMullvad deletes all transactions as soon as they are allowed by law/contract with pay agent. That's 45 days for some things and 60 for others I believe. They have more details on their site. This assumes you trust them to shred that info though. They also supposedly don't keep ip logs, but I assume their ISP does, so I guess that's of limited value.
- jaywalk 4y agoWhy would it matter if their ISP keeps IP logs? Those logs would not be able to link an IP address to anything of value.
- stjohnswarts 4y agosometime just having meta info is enough for 3LA orgs. They would know the user is using mullvad services as the most obvious which is enough to get you multiple year sentences in some repressive countries.