[wormseed]

> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space.

This is a dumb conspiracy theory. Facebook has made plenty of public statements that say otherwise, and there's a whole team that works on the system that ensures every trace is erased from disks, logs, cold storage and backups when deleting content.

[ridgeguy]

Looking online briefly for definitions of "delete":

"remove or obliterate (written or printed matter), especially by drawing a line through it or marking it with a delete sign."

"synonyms: remove, cut out, take out, edit out, expunge, excise, eradicate, cancel"

All of these seem clearly "absolute" to me. "Delete" means it's gone.

I think Facebook has its own special linguistic distortion field. It requires no "dumb conspiracy theory" to realize that Facebook cannot be trusted.

[pbhjpbhj]

Deletion by flag is very common in IT and presumably has been since the first undelete program was created. It's not a Facebook thing.

Some mail programs for a long time have had a soft-delete that requires an expunging process to create compete removal.

In an IT setting you can delete a blob from a db, but it might still be on disk, and it will still be in caches, on user machines, and in backups/archives.

[mic47]

Because FB deletes by flag so that content disappear instantly and then start the actual process of deletion (which can take while because of stuff like backup, cols storage)...

[ohazi]

I'm not inclined to believe PR statements like these when there's no way to verify them.

Can you support your assertion? The infrequent cases where someone manages to extract or recover supposedly deleted data cast a lot of doubt on your claims.

In any case, even if it's not Facebook specifically, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the majority of companies do not actually delete your data.

[mic47]

FB is/was regularly audited by Irish DPC, I think one of the topics was user data deletion. I think that the results were public.

[boffinism]

To be fair though, the article that this comment thread is attached to offers some seemingly direct evidence to support one aspect of this 'dumb' 'conspiracy' 'theory'.

[zaat]

Did you read the OP? How can you say that this is a dumb conspiracy theory?

[xab9]

First lesson in DB class: do NOT delete. Just flag.

I can give you plenty of statements about how I'm Santa Claus though.