[jrockway]

Backups. Why commit to reliable destruction of data when you don't have to?

Google has a guarantee on when your deleted data disappears from tapes in vaults, and it was something that every engineer at the company had to think about (not to mention a ton of work in actually implementing it). You may wish for Some New Startup with 2 engineers to do it for you, but it's hard, takes time, and nobody actually cares. Look at how many people use Patreon despite that policy. Why spend years of engineering work when your lawyer can get the problem fixed in 5 minutes? It's just economics.

[speedplane]

The issue with facebook is not that they simply hold a copy of your data after your relationship ends, but that they have permission to continue using it. Few content creators would object to Facebook keeping a random copy of their content on a tape drive. It's like a book publisher keeping your a copy of a rejected manuscript in a warehouse somewhere.

The real problem is when Facebook uses that content to further their business interests. Likewise, the publisher shouldn't be sending that rejected manuscript around for others to mine for ideas.

(that said, to avoid the temptation that gives rise to this precise problem, it's common practice for publishers to return rejected manuscripts)

[aikah]

> Backups. Why commit to reliable destruction of data when you don't have to?

That argument makes no sense if you're talking about publishing, AKA making something available to the public.

[jrockway]

I disagree. By default, the copyright holder reserves all rights. For the website to display that content, they need a license. When the owner deletes the content, it disappears from the website, so no license is required. This is a "happy path" that allows an agreement like "when you delete your account, you revoke our license to distribute your content, and we will comply with our legal obligations".

But the real world of production computer systems is not always the happy path. Consider the case where you delete your account, then the service suffers a database problem, and your content doesn't actually get deleted (failover to a replica, restore from backup, etc.) Now they are violating that contract with you. That is why they make the terms of the contract "in perpetuity" so the engineers can fix the production system incrementally, rather than saying "welp, there's a risk of a lawsuit if we failover to the backup, so we're shutting off the website and paying back the shareholders, everyone go home, we're done here".

Like I said, some companies take a middle ground where they really do guarantee deletion even if unhappy events take place at exactly the wrong time. It is possible. It's just not very economical.

[pluma]

Well thank god the GDPR already killed that old scapegoat (unless your creative content backups are guaranteed 100% PII free).

If this was just about liability, the terms could be much narrower. They're intentionally broad to guarantee the maximum benefit to the platform and allow them to come up with other uses for that data later on.

This is exploitative and only works because of the power imbalance between platforms and individual creators. Even if you follow the idea of the "free marketplace" you'll have to acknowledge that creators have no individual leverage when it comes to platforms with "take it or leave it" ToS.