
What It Takes to Truly Delete Data - spaceboy
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-it-takes-to-truly-delete-data/
======
Pfhreak
It's difficult to teach this lesson to people.

It was difficult for me to learn this lesson personally. When I understood it,
I deleted my Facebook account (best decision, btw), but I assume that even
though my account was deleted there are still references to it all over. IDs
in log lines, references not cleaned up -- enough to paint something of a
picture of who I was and what I did with the site.

Now I'm more judicious in what I share, how I share it, which applications I
give permissions. But I'm still leaking metadata everywhere. It's frustrating
and terrifying that the cost of participating in our society is either a HUGE
cognitive load in keeping an eye on all the data you emit or accepting that
basically everyone will have full access to your (meta)data over time.

~~~
conductr
The society part is tough and frustrating. I get so tired of arguing with
clerks that want my email, zip code, phone #, etc. I don't want to give
everyone that, and it really slows down the checkout process in general. Just
take my damn money.

A few weeks ago, I walked away from a purchase because the store wanted to
take my photo at POS. This was my first encounter with the store, I probably
would not be a repeat customer, I just wanted to do a single purchase. Just
take my damn money.

The stupid part is, I typically use the same credit card for every purchase. I
know they could use that to query info product and know everything about me -
and, I don't really care about that (I've given in to it). It's the constant
asking for info by companies that I have no ongoing relationship with that I
really hate.

Edit: Also, it makes me feel like some weirdo freak when I don't want to
participate. It starts to cause a scene. Other customers are staring. My wife
is embarrassed. Everyone is thinking, "just let them take the photo" or "the
clerk is just doing their job".

~~~
x1798DE
WTF store wants to take your photo just to sell you something? I can't
possibly imagine submitting to that unless it was for something _amazing_ or
something where the photography was obviously necessary to use the product.

~~~
conductr
It was just a local business. Clothing boutique. Seemed like the thought was
build me a profile, they would send curated picks that fit my style. And of
course people with profile pics are more engaged!

The in store onboarding was actually a smart idea. Things like that are
applauded by HN folks like us. Increasing LTV,... However, the clerk told me a
pic was mandatory. I even said something like "take a picture of the wall
then" and he said no like he was offended I asked him to cheat the system. I
just turned around and walked out of the shop.

I was just trying to buy a tshirt. I didn't want to establish and ongoing
relationship with this place photo or not.

------
rads
If @realDonaldTrump deletes a tweet, it's against the Twitter ToS to republish
it using a bot.

When it does happen I've seen people post screenshots of the old tweet. This
doesn't prove anything more than trivial knowledge of the Chrome Web
Inspector.

I've thought about distributing a program so people can keep their own local
archives of important tweets. There are plenty of ways to achieve this
already, but that's besides my point.

How can we make it obvious when an important figure deletes a tweet without
breaking Twitter's ToS?

~~~
throwaway2016a
> doesn't prove anything more than trivial knowledge of the Chrome Web
> Inspector

That might be generous. They could have used Photoshop as well and had no
technical knowledge at all.

~~~
grenoire
Inspector makes it practically impossible to prove wrong. You literally cannot
get the font, positioning, kerning, or spacing wrong with the replaced text.

------
zokier
While its still no silver bullet, encryption can make the problem more
manageable. For example for hard drives with full-disk encryption you should
be able to just throw away the key and the data should become inaccessible.
Same applies to for cloud backups; you don't know what the cloud provider
might do with the data you upload, but they should not be able to access the
content if it is properly encrypted, and as such the issues raised in the
article become lesser.

Of course this does not apply to data that is actually being used/processed in
cloud instead of just being passively stored.

------
bko
>That computer, armed with the company’s proprietary wiping software, uses a
special algorithm to programmatically access each bit on the drive, stored as
either a ‘0’ or ‘1,’ and write a new digit to it. The process must be repeated
at least three times and with different numbers to be up to DoD standards.

Maybe a stupid question, but why don't they just write every bit to either 1
or 0 regardless of its current content? Are they trying to preserve some data
and not others? Why do you need to do it multiple times if the bit being
written is independent of the actual contents?

~~~
adrianN
Drives store analog information and only present it in digital form to you. So
a 1 might be a 0.8 and a 0 might be a 0.2. Writing all ones might turn bits
that already were "1" to 0.9, while leaving bits that used to be "0" at 0.8.

~~~
0x0
It is generally accepted that it is impossible to recover data from a single
wipe on modern hard drives. There is some mention of it here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Number_of_overwri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Number_of_overwrites_needed)
and also I believe I read somewhere that there's unclaimed prizes available
for anyone who can prove otherwise (but I do not have a source available for
that now).

What can bite you is the drive firmware silently remapping sectors, causing
your write request to be mapped to a different sector altogether.

