Your data is never really deleted, for real!

In my continuation of the personal buzz with the “cloud” I need to write about how the data we store on various portals is never actually deleted. What data am I talking about? This is the personal information such as names, home town, addresses etc that we supply when opening accounts say on facebook, twitter or creating an email address on yahoo or Gmail.

Many a times I have come across people who said they have closed their facebook accounts. Even the websites purport to help close accounts if one needs to do so even though they make finding that option very difficult since users are their customers and the first mission of any enterprise is to retain existing customers.  There is also an online tool at www.accountkiller.com which is a self proclaimed solution to all problems such as a comment someone posted on facebook, some emails someone sent or stuff like that.

Well it’s important to note that at a technical level deleting any form of data is  near impossible. Let me start with the simple introduction to computer concepts. In any computer system, data is usually stored in a hard drive. If data is deleted on a hard drive it’s not deleted in the actual sense, the space it occupies is only marked as “free”. This space remains in that state until more data is posted there and overwrites the original one.

However no entity would dare delete data they have about anything. That’s the rule of the thumb. Even the DELETE commands learned in basic programming are just for demonstration purposes; they are never used, trust me on this. Whenever a user decides to close their account the script that runs at that point will only  tell the data manager at the back end to mark the account as closed. This is as simple as changing the status field from 1 to 0 or active to inactive/closed.

Moving on to another approach. Assuming that the data is actually deleted, does it mean that now all the information about a person is lost? No? This is because as long as a company collects information, then information is its source of competitive advantage. It has to take proactive steps to ensure that even the brink of Armageddon won’t make them lose the information they have. The very first step in achieving this is through laying out a water tight Disaster recovery programme.   When dealing with data what comes to mind first is continuous back-up of the live site with the backup copies encrypted and stored offsite. So even if someone tries to disappear the old fashioned way by bombing the data center where data about them is stored then still copies of the same will be available elsewhere for restoration.

That, just like some six people somewhere, is my verdit on why anyone’s data is never really deleted and can possibly be used against them. But the use against them is a post for another day.

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