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Comment by snowwolf | Hacker News Reader

Soft deletes as you describe aren't allowed under GDPR.

But a possible solution may be to disassociate the data from the customer (as long as the data itself isn't considered 'personal data'). For example, if the reason the data falls under GDPR is because it is connected to the customers email address, you could clear the email address. But that wouldn't let you ever re-associate it. But you could maybe (but don't take my word for it) one way hash the email address (bcrpyt, etc.) and if a dispute arises in the future scan the hashes for a match of the person raising the disputes email address in order to re-associate the data.

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My understanding, as someone implementing the GDPR-compliance for my company right now, is that if you could produce the same one-way hash a second time from the same input email address then the hash is still considered PI.

Yep, we've been through this discussion where I work just a few days ago and one way hashing even with salt is _not_ compliant as you can search for whatever you hashed and get a hit (SSNs, emails etc).

While GP stated soft-deletes aren't allowed, I figured I'd contribute to this thought exercise.

What about symmetric encrypting the field(s) and then giving the customer the key, and tell them to print it or store it safely, or else they won't be able to recover? And then don't store the key or write it to disk (remove it from memory)

Then you might as well scramble the data completely as the customer is not supposed to be able to recover the data after deletion.

We're going through a similar thought process now for a blockchain based data-store. If the data is symmetrically encrypted and the key is deleted.. does that count as hard deletion? The data is unrecoverable.

Fair point.

I can see the purpose of "right to be forgotten", but I think in some circumstances it is going to be abused. Any service that "bans" users for fraudulent/abusive activity and stores data about the banned user to prevent them from creating new accounts is going to have a problem. Banned user can just request to be forgotten and then create a new account. Unless there is some exception within GDPR that will support this use case.

This is probably covered by article 17, 3, e:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

You're allowed to ignore deletion rules for the purposes of:

3 Paragraphs 1 and 2 [the rights to be forgotten] shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:

(e) for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

Do you know how you are supposed to handle disputes in the future? If I ask that all my information be deleted and I say n months later I was charged for something I never received, how does the company disprove that?

You are legally required to retain payment history anyways for many years. So that's out of the GDPR scope.

No, it is in scope. It is just that the laws are not always consistent. And that's a problem, because you can't be the arbiter of which law takes precedence.

GDPR explicitly lists processing that is necessarily to fulfill legal obligations by european or local law as permitted without further permission and as a reason to deny a deletion request, that covers at least a lot of it. (although you still have to report your use to the user and follow general guidelines on handling sensitive data of course)

So, it is in scope, since it is covered by the law, and then the law explicitly gives you permission to make an exception. But you'd better do all of the following:

- have a legally trained person review your eventual solution and your reasoning behind it

- document the exceptions, which laws and which datums it covers

- keep track of the law as it changes, especially with new bodies of law such as the GDPR you can expect updates to reflect the situation on the ground and in a way the GDPR itself is such a change.

- be prepared to review the situation/code if the law changes in the future

- be aware that 'data retention' laws are very different from one industry to another (for instance telecommunications is a totally different beast than e-commerce)

point b of Article 17(1) of GDPR specifically says: (...) and where there is no other legal ground for the processing;

Compliance with tax & financial regulations counts as a "legal ground". But that doesn't mean companies can retain all of the email history.

Exactly, you need to make this decision on a per-data item level. Financial transactions are at a different level than other customer interactions, and whatever the local laws for retention of accounting data state is what you will have to mark very explicitly as exempt.

This can get quite complicated, moreso if a company deals with both consumers and companies as customers.

This is the guidance we have been given as well.

It'll depend on the kind of data you're talking about. If you are obligated to keep that data for legal purposes then there's no working around that. But then make an effort to only keep exactly the data you need.

However in the context you're asking - absolutely do delete where possible. If not possible then pseudo-anonymization is a way of dealing with this.

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