4 ms·

Not necessarily. Just because the government asks for them doesn't mean they exist. I'd be surprised if they were actually deleted though.

• gohrt 13y ago
  Google doesn't 100% say that the data is totally totally gone, but seems to say that it is no longer indexed for lookup by your accounr, after 60days after deletion: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7401?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7401?hl=en
  • saalweachter 13y ago
    I don't have any personal knowledge of this but if I were to recklessly speculate, I would wager "deleting stuff is hard". The typical concern is data loss, so to delete something completely you need to unwind your entire data loss prevention stack. Delete a file, delete a row from a database, wipe a cache from another server, scrub any ZFS-style filesystem versioning of data, mirror the changes to any off-site on-line backups and scrub everything there, retrieve any off-site off-line backups and wipe those... It's a non-trivial engineering task. If you want an email service which can readily delete your email, you need to find one with non-redundant, completely un-mirrored databases, fragile filesystems, and no backups. But that is not what most people are clamoring for in a service provider.
    • embolism 13y ago
      Creating a massive behavioral profiling advertising system is hard, as is creating a self driving car. Protecting users from Government intrusion is simply a lower priority for Google.
      • contingencies 13y ago
        Think of the architects! Each of them believe they are doing nothing wrong.