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Comment by hshehehjdjdjd | Hacker News Reader

If Facebook purged your information, how could they verify your identity? They don’t want to provide the ability to check if an arbitrary person was leaked, because that has its own privacy issues. So in this context I wonder what you expect them to do.

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Facebook takes up to 90 days to purge my information from their systems (if ever, I am quite sure a ghost account will always remain and it will be a strong one as well since they've collected so much information on me throughout the years). They have my email address, they could just email everyone whose data was shared.

Depends. Without knowing too many specifics here, I'd argue that if the account was deleted, Facebook should still hold onto basic info like username of the account that was shared with Cambridge. As far as I'm concerned, this is a legal matter now, and information about the parties that were affected are basically evidence.

Clearly there needs to be some line drawn, like not permanently keeping an archival of all information shared with Cambridge, as that would potentially cause more harm than good. Yet, knowing how many people were affected, and being able to identify if you were one of them, seems a permanently useful thing.

This of course is a bit idealist, I'm just answering the question on my idea of what should be done - not what will be done. Tbh, I'd rather see that data be held by some government entity and not FB at all, but I'm not sure who that would be, if they exist at all.

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