this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It’s no different than me sending an email to someone and then sending a request to delete it. There likely is still a copy on the email provider’s server and the recipient could have potentially backed up their emails to something outside of the email ecosystem.
Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely sure that there isn’t information you don’t want on the internet is to not share it at all. There will always be an issue of making sure every system actually deletes content when you request it. Like I said, that doesn’t stop anyone from backing up the data to another system. (E.g. Reddit archives from 2005 to now are available to download, even content that has already been deleted)
Honestly, I kinda question how good of a time investment it is to try and allow deletion from the public facing parts of the internet, given the numerous places where your content will be cached or otherwise stored.
There is certainly some value in simply making it as hard as possible to find things you want to delete. Why let perfect be the enemy of good, after all. There's plenty of types of content we certainly want to do our best at deleting even if we can't be perfect. Eg, do you wanna be the one to tell a revenge porn victim, "sorry, we can't make it harder to find the content that harms you because we can't delete all of it anyway"?
But at the same time, development time is limited. Everything is a trade off. We do have to decide what is most important, because we can't do it all immediately. The fact we can't actually delete everything does have to be a factor in this prioritization, too.
All this said, I do think federated, reliable deletion is critical for illegal content. Such content needs to be removed quickly and easily from as many places as possible. Without this, instance owners are put at considerable legal risk. This risk poses a threat to the scalability of the Fediverse.
Oh I wish we had the ability to fully delete our content that we’ve posted or that someone has posted of us. Illegal content is a huge concern with federation. As soon as someone pushes something like that, it gets sent to all the federated instances so they have a copy as well. That is a huge concern for instance owners (and honestly the fediverse as a whole).
I run a kbin instance and I’m a software developer for my day job. I honestly don’t have a great answer for “how do we ensure the data we request be deleted on the fediverse is actually deleted.” My best solution would for us to have several federated master databases that we maintain our federated content with. If there is a big delete flag for some content then the child instances will follow suit.