This is how most services work at scale. It's much cheaper to set a flag than actually delete an entry in a database. The data can then be scrubbed by some periodic maintenance process.
Only that doesn't typically happen. It just sits there, for years or until the company goes bust.
The typical reasoning is that marketing wants to hold on to the data, they will never ever say 'ok, enough, you may delete it' because there is this infinitely small chance that they can re-activate an account, market to it for some other product (no matter that that is against the GDPR) or to sell the data to some third party if there ever is a cash crunch or panic. They see data as having positive value no matter what, whereas data that you shouldn't be holding on to is actually a liability.
Did I claim that Facebook never really deletes data?
I just answered the GP, maybe you have your threads mixed up?
But if I were to speculate I would say that if Instagram does what the article title says that you could already make that claim about Facebook since they are a part of it.
We’re in a thread that specifically asks whether Facebook really does hard deletes, so I took your comment as claiming they don’t.
> We know that HN is visited by a fair share of Facebook employees.
Can some of you weigh in (anonymously?) on this topic? Do you guys do hard deletes of user data instead of just soft deletes?
The problem with just a flag is it slows down queries. You can scrub it later, but that’s just kicking the can down the road and now you have to deal with the consequences of an actual hard delete.
I wonder when popular databases will have some first class support for soft deletion built in.
