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Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

Of course I can. The question is - will they actually delete it everywhere inside their data storages or will they just send me a 200 response code.

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And what exactly does "delete" mean? It's removed from production, or it's also scoured from backups?

After I give them the data required to prove I'm authorized to delete the template, what happens to that data?

Trusting Facebook... rather jump down a well.

It is deleted, then added to a list of deleted faces.

Just so they can be sure not to re-add it later.

Yeah. That's it! And they're sticking with that story.

Sensing another Zuckerberg promise "to do better" in the works already.

At Amazon new products have a press release written during the spec phase (to help frame the pitch internally); I presume, at this point, fb writes an apology during spec phase...

Has he already apologized for the recent release of a half billion phone numbers?

Hey, we have just gotten a enormous phone directory for free! Why are you complaining?

Unless you want it restored in which case they'll undelete it for you. It's good design to provide an undo option after all.

Undo options are user friendly! And what if you really actually want them to use your face data, but hit it by accident? Maybe it's best if they just ignore the request all together. That way you can both feel good about things, users think they got what they wanted, and Facebook actually gets what it wants. Everyone wins. Except the user, who loses.

It's a face backup. In case you lose the original.

One has to wonder if they'll make a model of deleted faces.

Their definition of "delete" is to dissociate your identity from the data pieces. There's no true way to splice out a person from their database otherwise

Allowing regulators to look at systems, data and source code is the inevitable conclusion of this madness where software companies say one thing and do something completely different.

What could possibly go wrong with that...

Yeah this is all starting to feel a lot like what the NSA's definition of observing data is.

My guess: delete flag set in db, data remains but is ignored.

Is it even feasible to scour all their backups? And I don't mean the hot backups, I mean the annual data dumps stored on tapes in a data archive built in a cold war nuclear bunker somewhere in the Rockies.

Are they really using the word "delete"? I know this is pretty much forbidden in Google world.

yeah and what about future images, will they be associated with a shadow profile?

Is it deleted from the models? Clearly they aren't doing that. Do they fine tune their models so they can no longer identify you from your photo? I'd also doubt that. More clarification on deletion is needed.

Most often this is solved because the model is retrained only on the current data every N days.

Probably not. Because I imagine they aren't retaining off the original data but rather doing an online method. This means the network retains information about those images.

Yeah, if it's already been shared with commercial partners, or especially, if it's already been shared with government agencies, the cat is out of the bag. Not really sure what can be done to regain control of that data?

But, hey, at least FB will "delete" it!

So, yeah, I guess there's that? :(

*202 never to be executed

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