alt Hacker NewsFive years ago everybody would lough about "soft deletes" or "marked as deleted". Whoever thought this is a good idea from a data protection perspective? You also lying in the face of your users with such a behavior. Shame.
Five years ago everybody would lough about "soft deletes" or "marked as deleted". Whoever thought this is a good idea from a data protection perspective? You also lying in the face of your users with such a behavior. Shame.
Except almost every database (and most storage devices nowadays) works this way - mark an entry as deleted, then batch delete a lot of entries during garbage collection. It's fundamentally impossible to efficiently erase a record from the middle of a file, except maybe by using an encryption tree, which would still be fairly inefficient.
Actually erasing data is quite hard. Soft deletes doesn't add any new lies, they just move the lies to the upper layer.