This is the sort of word game that surely wouldn't last ten seconds in any courtroom.
"Did you delete the data or not?"
"Yes, we deleted the data."
"Then how is it that we're all sitting here looking at it?"
This modern fiction of pretending something is deleted just because someone set a flag called "deleted" has about as much relevance to actual deletion as the evil bit in an IPv4 header has to actual Internet security. It's not deleted in any technical sense, nor in the common English meaning of the word.
But the reality is that is exactly what is happening when you delete a file. It sets a flag as deleted in the file system. The data reminds there until overwritten. Computers have worked this way since forever. Also if you look at the definition of delete it matches this. To remove by striking out or canceling, not to remove all remove all traces.
But the reality is that is exactly what is happening when you delete a file. It sets a flag as deleted in the file system.
Sure, but no-one is testifying before a senior government committee that such files were "deleted" in a context where deletion is clearly understood to mean making permanently irretrievable. If the committee called any IT expert to give evidence and asked if data had really been deleted under those conditions, surely no-one who understood the technicalities would say yes.
Computers have worked this way since forever.
A lot of things have been done "since forever" in the computer age. The fact that some of those things might not be good ideas and public awareness has finally reached the point where something might actually be done about it is rather the point here.
The point people are trying to make is that properly practiced law can't be circumvented by these kinds of arguments.
If there was a requirement to do something with the data and it was not done then you failed, technical jargon and implementation details are irrelevant.
I really do not think this is accurate. I have been in a courtroom when a file was described as 'deleted' and then an expert witness 'recovered' the 'deleted' file, which was entered as evidence.
Delete is a technical word that has a specfiic meaning. Unlike most language, technical terms are (to some degree) clearly defined and should not change over time or with common usage. Whether people misinterpret the word arbitrarily is not important when experts are being consulted - they use the word as defined. The word delete means what it means, and any expert giving testimony about it would use the same definition. It certainly doesn't mean removing information completely from existence with no possibility of it surviving in any way or ever being retrieved.
Recovering a deleted file is identical to the concept of recovering a shredded document. Its more about intent and purpose rather than result. A shredded document is intended to be destroyed, but its obvious that it can be recovered if you got all the pieces. If you however put the paper in the basement and simply pretend to have destroyed it then I can see how a court would object.
Let think of an example where a government employee has a requirement to destroy documents and computer records as part of normal operations. Would marking the document as "destroyed" and then put in the basement be acceptable? Similarly, would marking the computer record in a database as "inaccessible" be enough? I personally doubt that the court would accept either method.
Respectfully, the fact that we're having this discussion means some participants aren't adhering to the technical definition. There's a meandering, geographically and socialogically heterogeneous definition that is non-technical. In court, I believe a technical expert would use the former, not the latter (unless specifically required to do otherwise).
What do you think that definition is? I've never seen a single, authoritative, technical definition of the term, nor anyone with the authority to write one.
English courts don't like to give specific technical meanings to words. They prefer to use the everyday meaning as understood by the reasonable person.
I understand this is perhaps a cultural difference to the US.
But the file system overrides the (former) file content eventually. You don't have a guarantee you can retrieve the content anymore. You'd need to use forensic tools for that anyway. I think any jury can understand this. Setting a flag in a database column is a big difference, as the data never becomes purged eventually.
Well, you could also encrypt the data with a per-user key and throw that away when you delete the user. No the data was not deleted, but access to it is.
There are ways to design data retention around deletable constraints like this. The bigger question is more like “do we trust facebook to agree with us on what deleting an account acually means?”
For isntance, i’m curious if you delete your account whether they still do the shadow account tracking. I’m betting they do.
Are you operating at scale? I hope you have a very robust backup system (including enough that you can even recover from something like the Sony hack), and so you're going to need to ensure that you delete it from those systems. And then, you're dealing with 100s (1000s? 10000s?) of these deletions a day. Do you want that to be instant? Are you really that confident in your deletion that you want it instantly overwriting your backups? How are you resistant to the Sony hack in that case? ...
I don’t know about a general purpose system for this, but it’s generally easier to proactively delete or make inaccessible something in a singe data store. Encryption reduces the problem to a single element in a single data store. You’re not wrong, but it’s a problem worth solving for the ability to not have to solve the problem 1000 times over for each bit of user data.
"Did you delete the data or not?"
"Yes, we deleted the data."
"Then how is it that we're all sitting here looking at it?"
This modern fiction of pretending something is deleted just because someone set a flag called "deleted" has about as much relevance to actual deletion as the evil bit in an IPv4 header has to actual Internet security. It's not deleted in any technical sense, nor in the common English meaning of the word.