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For every customer that legitimately wants their data deleted there's a hundred that complain their data is gone after confirming deletion. The same customers t
by goosejuice 2y ago
For every customer that legitimately wants their data deleted there's a hundred that complain their data is gone after confirming deletion. The same customers that mark your transactional email as spam then complain about not being able to get into their account.
Exaggerating here, but I do think soft deletion practices can be partially blamed on real business problems. I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though.
- silisili 2y agoI get that a little from the company perspective, but it leads to its own issues of perhaps more important magnitude. If you have data for a user, who wants to delete it, you can soft delete to allow recovery to prevent complaints. On the other hand, 5 years from now your system gets hacked, and now you have to email some person you haven't done business with in 5 years to tell them their data that you claimed was deleted was leaked. Sure you can do soft deletions with some hacky actual delete schedule but it doesn't really solve the problem, only reduces the timeline.
- johnisgood 2y agoWhy not educate the customer? "If you request deletion, do not expect your data back, because it truly will be deleted!". Sad state of world that this has to be said, however. Discord (and many other places) allow you to recover your account within a specific period of time, but they do not delete anything, you just simply lose access and your name gets changed (and avatar and status removed), but all your DMs are there, all your messages are there (although I understand why, especially in servers (guilds)). There is a way to bulk save and delete messages from Discord, however.
- speff 2y agoPeople in general simply do not read warnings like that. It’s a form of autopilot that everyone utilizes to function/cope in an age where they’re being bombarded with too much information
- goosejuice 2y agoPrecisely. I'm specifically talking about cases where such a warning was present. Customers will claim they never saw it or any other excuse.
- johnisgood 2y agoCannot you point them to the warning and be done with it after a complaint, or is the amount of the complaints and its handling is the issue?
- goosejuice 2y agoWhen I say warning, I'm talking about a prompt after attempting to delete that asks if they are sure and clearly states that the action is permanent. This would display on every attempt to delete a record.
- johnisgood 2y agoYeah, but why care if they did not see the warning and they actively clicked on it? It is their fault.
- johnisgood 2y agoCorrection: "unofficial way [to ...]".
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> The same customers that mark your transactional email as spam then complain about not being able to get into their account. That's on you though - shouldn't have sent spam pretending to be transactional email.
- miyuru 2y agoI have seen people report confirmation emails, they themself requested. Internet is not what we used to have years ago, currently the majority of users are not tech literate and that creates new problems now.
- goosejuice 2y agoMany users don't understand what happens when they press the spam button on a password change request or similar email. I'm not talking about unsolicited email, but legitimate transactional email related to the account that only triggers off a user action.
- account42 2y agoMany more spammers think their special and their crap doesn't actually smell.
- zmgsabst 2y agoA few reasons: - you have legal obligations no matter what the customer wants, eg, Amazon and storing transactions for tax reasons - you do actively delete most of their data, eg profiles, but “deleted=true” on their central account record is needed to propagate the deletion to other systems, eg, customer analytics - you tombstone it for efficiency reasons and only periodically delete the records as part of your checkpoint/backup procedure; similarly CDN deployments - you delete all the live copies, but tell customers “retained up to 90 days” because you need backups to age out I’m not saying companies are all innocent — but there are some legitimate reasons that deletions aren’t fully instant.
- goosejuice 2y agoYes, but if you have a legitimate need, then you should just inform the user when the data will be removed and why.
- randomNumber7 2y ago> I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though. When the data has value to the company and it is legal to keep it it seems very sensible to keep it (out of the perspective of s.o. acting in the interest of the company).
- goosejuice 2y agoBy burn I mean legitimate deletion, as in remove all of my data from your service. If you offer deletion of that sort then it's misleading to retain.
- randomNumber7 2y agoI understand what you mean but you don't want to understand what I wrote.
- nikanj 2y agoTo be fair, tons of companies flag their promotional newsletters as transactional urgent act immediately. It's not hard to see why users don't really react to emails anymore