Hacker News Reader

Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

You can have a backup and if necessary still delete that record in the backup. It's going to be more expensive and complicated, but it does not preclude backups.

I've worked in health systems where personal data would get selectively removed not just from our database, but also from backups.

View on HN

You can do that, but doing so would give you no protection against the deletion process being applied to records that should not be deleted as happened here. The whole point of this process is that those records need to be irretrievably destroyed.

This is true. Like I said-- more complicated. You have to make sure you don't permanently delete the wrong thing.

> no copy may be retained

This is the key element. A copy may exist, but it must also be deleted. Totally a technical problem that has already be solved.

I don’t consider an issue solved until there are commodity implementations of the solution. Right now there are bespoke backup systems that can do per-record deletion and lots of orgs are relying on maximum retention policies to do ensure deletion on “traditional” backup systems. Until off-the-shelf backup software like Veeam and Borg can handle the use-case it will always be an option only if you have a staff of developers instead of an IT staff.

Across the US, courts require data to be hard-deleted in cases of, for example, the expungement of a juvenile’s criminal record. This is a technical problem faced by all courts. Are you suspecting that courts are not taking backups, or that they are not properly wiping expunged records from their backups, or that courts employ developers that build bespoke backup pruning systems?

I used to do IT in the public sector but not for the court system. I'm saying that they're almost surely using some off-the-shelf backup tool and having "deletions will filter though the backups in $x months" as a good enough solution.

Reaching into the backups or doing per-record encryption isn't something that you can just buy at this point.

Data retention and deletion are opposites. It's practically impossible to get both right. It's a target that you have to hit exactly, and being extra good at one makes you worse at the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com