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Even when companies are honest about how "delete" works, they will use weasel language such as "delete from history" or "delete from inbox" instead of actually

Even when companies are honest about how "delete" works, they will use weasel language such as "delete from history" or "delete from inbox" instead of actually doing the thing the user intends.

xeromal 1y ago
This half the time due to people wanting to recover their accidental mistakes from deleting stuff. IMO hard deleting things is generally a bad practice until the user wants to delete their entire account or some other very explicit action is executed.
- josefritzishere 1y ago
  It is still the process at most large firms to delete data after certain intervals of time. the failure to have and follow a data deletion policy is a huge legal risk... even if that interval is 10 years. Forever is the one definitively wrong answer.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    That's what I meant by very explicit action.
bombcar 1y ago
Part of that is the company doesn't even know what they do internally - sometimes it purges instantly, other times it gets marked deleted in a database table that never gets purged until the fifteen billion row table takes down the service.
- jajko 1y ago
  Company that wants to know, knows. The more these data are to the core of their reason for existence the better and more current this knowledge is. Don't give these aholes a pass they never ever deserved, they don't have any moral higher ground or moral 'credits' to burn. openAI is not different.
- fizx 1y ago
  At a tech company of >1k engineers, this gets audited regularly by a dedicated data retention team.
yreg 1y ago
I have no experience with this, but I imagine actually deleting files from some giant collection of data that needs to be safely backed up is borderline impossible, no? I expect that the big tech companies have all kinds of cold storage backups and no one is going to actually go spelunking in those archives to physically delete my data when I delete an email. It's more likely that they will delete the keys to decrypt it, but even the keys must be safely stored somewhere, so it's the same problem just with less data.

Even when companies are honest about how "delete" works, they will use weasel language such as "delete from history" or "delete from inbox" instead of actually doing the thing the user intends.

xeromal 1y ago

This half the time due to people wanting to recover their accidental mistakes from deleting stuff. IMO hard deleting things is generally a bad practice until the user wants to delete their entire account or some other very explicit action is executed.

josefritzishere 1y ago
It is still the process at most large firms to delete data after certain intervals of time. the failure to have and follow a data deletion policy is a huge legal risk... even if that interval is 10 years. Forever is the one definitively wrong answer.
- xeromal 1y ago
  That's what I meant by very explicit action.

bombcar 1y ago

Part of that is the company doesn't even know what they do internally - sometimes it purges instantly, other times it gets marked deleted in a database table that never gets purged until the fifteen billion row table takes down the service.

jajko 1y ago
Company that wants to know, knows. The more these data are to the core of their reason for existence the better and more current this knowledge is. Don't give these aholes a pass they never ever deserved, they don't have any moral higher ground or moral 'credits' to burn. openAI is not different.
fizx 1y ago
At a tech company of >1k engineers, this gets audited regularly by a dedicated data retention team.

yreg 1y ago

I have no experience with this, but I imagine actually deleting files from some giant collection of data that needs to be safely backed up is borderline impossible, no? I expect that the big tech companies have all kinds of cold storage backups and no one is going to actually go spelunking in those archives to physically delete my data when I delete an email. It's more likely that they will delete the keys to decrypt it, but even the keys must be safely stored somewhere, so it's the same problem just with less data.