[kryten]

It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data.

It's just hard.

We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit.

But we do it, because we are honest.

Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.

[skrebbel]

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "our platform", but if I post a youtube video, it gets popular, but I get ashamed of it and decide to delete it again, the video will have spread far and wide to other video sites again.

Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on.

How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student video from the internet's video sites?

The only way "your platform" can do this, is by actively working to block public access to that video in the first place. Then you can have fun (or not) deleting those 20-100Gb datasets. My point is that that means accepting that you're posting stuff to a walled garden.

[dave5104]

It sounds like his platform is perhaps a private enterprise platform? In other words, it doesn't sound like Facebook or Youtube where information can easily spread, which is probably a prerequisite for having control over your data.

The company I work for deals with background checks and screening information on behalf of our clients' clients. I could definitely see us safely removing all of that personal information from our system and not being able to recover it. But at the same time, we're a much much much smaller organization compared to Facebook.

[D9u]

     *Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever*

I've tried looking for stuff I posted on craigslist 5 or 6 years ago and nothing was in the wayback machine, only dead links to a few posts.

Apparently the crawls of the site only went a couple/few layers deep, as well as crawls not being conducted daily, and some years had only 2 or 3 crawls for the entire year.

I haven't tried searching my old facebook posts yet though, maybe some sites are more thoroughly catalogued than others.

Perhaps some other entity is storing my old posts, but I doubt that the NSA will allow me to access my own data.

[dredmorbius]

This doesn't mean someone else didn't archive the material.

Though it might not be generally / publicly available. Could still be on sale somewhere.

[zwily]

Do you also delete their data from all your database backups?

[kryten]

Yes. They are cycled out after a week. Our data is useless after then as most of it is real time. Audit logs are kept offline in gzipped daily text files per client and these are handed over to the company and deleted.