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Comment by splouk | Hacker News Reader

If I ask Facebook to delete my data, it should be deleted. Why does caching or reliability have anything to do with that?

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or reliability

If our company had to delete all customer data for a particular customer, then I would need to:

restore 6 months of database backups individually, remove the data, then run then take and store each backup again.

have 3 years worth of tape backups shipped back to us from our data protection company. Restore the databases off of them, delete the data, store them back on tape, and have them shipped back to the long term storage facility.

Backup users' data encrypted with a recovery key. Delete the key, presto, the users' data is no longer accesible.

Would you be satisfied with, "this data will be deleted once the deletion filters though the caches and backups?"

If "once" is a reasonable time (as defined by the regulation) then yes, I'd be satisfied.

but I doubt the average user will be comfortable with such an experience.

I doubt the average user needs anything more than "as per EU regulations, your data will be deleted in X days" when they delete their account.

It is not just the deletion when closing your account. It is the keeping track of all the copies that have to be made during regular operation (including packets in temporary buffers, periodic backups, cached version, redundant copies to hedge against data loss) just incase one day the user decides to delete.

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