Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Why does OpenAI collect and retain for 30 days^1 chats that the user wants to be deleted

When working on an e-commerce gig we would get "delete my data" requests from customers, which we're legally obliged to comply with. A script would delete everything we could from the DB immediately. Since we had 30 day backups, their data would only be deleted from the backups on day 31. I think this was acceptable to the GDPR consultant.

Going in to the backups to delete their data there in insane.



> Going in to the backups to delete their data there in insane.

If I was legally obliged to delete data then I'd make sure I deleted, regardless of the purpose or location of the storage. If you can't handle a delete request you shouldn't collect the data in the first place.


People expect to see their past orders, save their address, keep a shopping cart, a list of favorites etc.

If you don't want your data online then don't put it there.


What you want to do is encrypt/anonymize per user information using a translation layer that also gets backed up. In case of a gdpr request, you delete this mapping / key and voila: data cleanup. The backup data becomes unusable.

But this obviously means building an extensive system to ensure the encoded identifier is the only thing used across your system (or a giant key management system).

In the past I’ve been a part of systems at exabyte scale that had to implement this. Hard but not impossible. I can see how orgs try to ‘legalese’ their way out of doing this though because the only forcing function is judicial.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: