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I asked 100 companies for my data. Some deleted it instead.
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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Also... even if a co tries to fill a deletion request in good faith, and even if they didn't sell your data already... it can actually be hard.
Major companies have disaster recovery procedures. Multiple off-site backups. You have to not only remove from all live systems, but w/e kinds of backups exist. Those might be on mag tape in a vault deep underground in a mine! Managed by a whole other data archiving company.
Even deleting from online systems can have issues. Normal delete just removes the dir metadata. The disk blocks remain. You can overwrite to scrub those, but some drives may re-allocate or duplicate blocks on their own, making that hard too.
Altering backups is not required. But it has to be "marked", so even when the backup is used that is removed.