[asuffield]

> how difficult would it be to let him access his data sans the illicit material?

It's not my service, and I'm talking about the general case rather than this specific one, but that seems to me like it would be pretty complicated - you'd need some sort of review procedure to determine what material can and cannot be distributed, you'd need to somehow do this while preserving user privacy, and you'd need some engineering work to make all this possible.

A project of that scope could take weeks or months to complete, depending on the amount of data involved.

[jlarocco]

That sounds like BS.

Presumably the blog was only deleted because there's already some review procedure in place, and it found something that can't be distributed.

[asuffield]

You seem to be talking about some specific incident, and guessing about what happened. We're discussing the general case of what you do when you've got a large collection of data that isn't yours, and all you know is that some part of it can't be distributed.

[jlarocco]

>You seem to be talking about some specific incident, ...

I thought it was obvious from context that I was referring to the specific case in the article.

Anyway, I don't think the general case you're describing makes sense or is very realistic. It's impossible to know some part of the data collection can't be distributed without somebody or something looking at it. Either the person reporting it, or the algorithm flagging it should be able to identify the specific data items that can't be distributed.