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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

> My company doesn't share or sell data with third parties (it's in our TOS – and could obviously change in some Orwellian future, but we'd have to update the TOS), it's the customer's data, they can use it in the same way they'd use any other data they collect. We don't do cross-domain tracking, or aggregate behavioral information across customers, and the way we've built it, it makes it pretty hard to tie any two visitors together across sites if you were to hypothetically acquire our dataset.

Are you the CEO and do you currently own controlling interest? Because if not, then everything that you are saying is worth about as much as a slice of pizza someone dropped in the NYC subway.

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Nope, happy to fall on a sword if this happens though.

Also – really bummed you got downvoted – this point is very valid and other folks in my position should take note.

@codezero, my point was not about falling on a sword. Rather it was that NH has this extreme naivete related to statements coming from those that do not have any real say.

How many people here think that data is removed from BI data lakes when a user deletes the account ( or at +N months )?

[Edit: Downvotes on this one also?]

Ask what happens to customer's data used by business intelligence when customer deletes the account in your company. Do it in email so it is in writing. It would be extremely illuminating.

Ask if what when a customer or your app acting on a behalf of your customer executes a DELETE against your API your API deletes the record or:

1) sets a deleted_at to now which your ORM treats as "deleted"

2) send a message to a queue (Customer XYZ deleted record P) which has multiple subscribers, one of which executes a deletion while the other one dumps the new state into a BI lake/archive dataset/what-if-a-customer-comes-back-would-not-we-want-to-be-able-to-give-them-all-their-data-back database?

I get where you are coming from but you are also making some assumptions that are a bit broad. It’s a laudable goal to educate naive folks on HN, I support you in that, but you should try a different approach.

I’m not naive. I’ve been working in tech since 1996 when I managed a dial up ISP. I worked at Red Hat the day they IPOed and have been with Heap for almost four years. I was employee number 8, and personally wrote much of the code to remove data from our databases.

We have strict controls and logging around who can access our infra, as is necessary for SOC2 compliance. We have rolling backups (that are read only except by very specific individuals) so even if I got real mad one day and decided to ruin my career, we could restore the data, however, we don’t keep backups indefinitely so when data is deleted or removed with intent, it will eventually be gone in backups too.

I’m not on the board, but I do have influence as I am the head of our solutions and support team. I am a privacy advocate and take a firm stand on protecting my customers’ data and executing their own desires to protect their customers, and I do my best to not only instill these things in my team and company, but also to make policies and controls to make them real.

When I delete data, I don’t rely on a message being sent to a queue. I do not “soft” delete. When our customers ask for their data to be deleted, we delete it without delay.

I will say that sending a message in a queue would be pretty efficient and if we went that route I’d have the consumer of that message verify that the data was deleted.

Ultimately our backing store is Postgres, it’s not rocket science to understand how deleting that data works, we could get into a discussion about how it’s not really deleted until it’s been reallocated, at the DB and at the OS and hardware levels, but I don’t think you’re trying to make that argument.

Is everything perfect? No, that would be naive to say, but we don’t assume it is and work hard to remain accountable.

I’m happy to discuss this or about anything else here or over email, Skype, hangout, in person, etc, but I do want to say that you should challenge your own assumptions a bit more. Not every person or company is inherently bad, naive or ignorant. A lot of people on HN are extremely tenured, bright, and thoughtful, they just usually know better than to comment here, if anything, that is my most naive action.

Jesus. Really? Downvotes? Pretend this person worked for facebook and made some statement regarding what the company does.

(a) he would be fired on the spot by the company itself ( as he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the company )

(b) he would be laughed out the room because he does not control company decisions

The same applies to every single company. Every single one.

I have no idea what you're talking about. People from big tech companies say their opinion about what their company does all the time.

Your comment was super rude.

Really? People at Google say that they know what Google does with data?!

Agreed, they make a good point, however, I think the terms of service are binding, and if what we're doing changes, we _must_ update them. This, of course, does not change the fact that we've collected a lot of data and it would suddenly fall under the new terms of service.

With that said, I actively delete customer data on request, and a terms of service change like this _might_ (very reasonably) prompt someone to request their data to be deleted, and since terms of service are not typically immediately effective without consent, I feel strongly that I would make sure I could remove data for people who do not agree with the new terms of service. What I'm saying, is that I would fight very hard for my customers, like, ridiculously hard.

As said above – I am not the CEO – I don't have controlling interest, and there is absolutely some future where the things I said above are impossible to execute. I have not felt that way yet, and I am very conscious of the possibility if that in the future, and will stay vigilant both for my customers and for my own peace of mind to make sure we're always doing the right thing.

I'll have a wild guess there: all devs and most managers have access to the full data set. Any disgruntled one could ex-filtrate it anywhere with not trace.

That's the kind of things which make me for the vision of data as liability.

They should have internal security teams that monitor this

Damn it. You owe me a new keyboard.

Absolutely not. We have strict control over our data and access to infrastructure.

Every person with access can only get it via a bastion VPN with their own key. Access is logged to an external host which they do not have access to. We are SOC2 compliant (just waiting on final certification) and we have regular pen tests both against our code as well as our employees with mock phishing.

As a total aside: it would cost a serious amount of money to exfiltrate the data in bulk, and would cause an obvious strain on our infrastructure. Assuming they get by all the above protections, and are really clever, sure, never say never, but I think we can not assume the worst but prepare for it none the less.

Yes, since new ToS have always been retroactively applied to all previously collected data they offer zero privacy protection over the long term.

Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003 (October 2016)

An effective opt-out may help most of the vigilant, but it is in the best interest of those changing the ToS to keep it as confusing/hush-hush as possible.

You are right. But speaking out the truth isn't compatible with HN users as of late. So see downvoting and getting flagged as a sign you are right, just the other try to hide your post and keep you from posting. Unfortunately the atmosphere got really toxic, with many things got hidden from users, the down-voting/flagging does no good.

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