this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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As a person working in a field close to data engineering this sounds like they're actually honest about the process.
Tldr: it's not possible to "just delete" everything at once, even though we'd love to be able to.
There's so many layers of where information is stored, and such insane amounts of data in their data platform. so running a clean up job to delete a single persons data in oltp databases, data lakes, dwh's, backups, etc, would both be expensive and inefficient. Instead what they then do is to do it in stages: flip a flag somewhere (is_deleted = true) which lets it be removed from view initially, and then running periodic clean-up jobs.
A photo I deleted 10 years ago resurfaced on my Google Drive account recently.
I'm sure it was deleted, and it had never appeared before until now.
But sure, they're being honest!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Doesn't apply, nor matter.
Malice or not, their systems didn't delete my photo, that's the point.
Sounds like a great reason not to use their services
This is any company, government, or other organisation with +80 employees. The two other alternatives are
I'd love to hear of there's other ways of doing this stuff that actually works, but so far I just haven't experienced it in my career yet.
I'm not disputing the technical aspect. But due to these realities I prefer to drastically limit the services I interact with.
Aha I misunderstood, thanks for clarifying.
Actually for this specific context, there's an easy solution: I reckon for llms self-hosting would be the way to go, if your hardware supports it. I've heard a lot of the smaller models have gotten a lot more powerful over the last year.
Small fine tuned models seem to be where the market as a whole is headed. Even the big players like OpenAI/Google/Meta are doing this as a means to optimize infrastructure. The Qwen3 models have been really interesting to work with.
Or, optionally, host it yourself
Good point!
I mean this in the most polite way possible, but it seems like youve never read a privacy policy before
What makes you say that?