[chomp]

Yep, we have an abstraction layer on top of the ORM to provide common queries. "Give me all X" will always return stuff not soft deleted. Data people also like to go diving through old data, and without getting into data warehousing and stuff like that, it's not too complex to support a single flag to enable us to keep old stuff.

[delusional]

They might like to, but you should definitely consider if saving data no longer required for your business violates privacy regulation/ethical considerations.

[chomp]

Definitely. When a user "deletes" their account, we null out all identifying fields to "DELETED_PII_$user_id". We have running metrics we compute that would go off the rails if we dropped the row completely.