[grinsekatze]

Even if they offered a delete button any time before GDPR comes into effect I would not trust and use it. I also don't like the idea of using one of those chrome extensions mentioned here. To me, currently this is synonymous to hiding everything they have on me from myself.

But doing this after May 25 would mean I definitely want it gone for good and if they don't fully delete what I manually remove, I expect them to get themselves into trouble.

[g_p]

> But doing this after May 25 would mean I definitely want it gone for good and if they don't fully delete what I manually remove, I expect them to get themselves into trouble.

You're technically right here, but it seems at present that most companies won't be complying with this for quite some time (perhaps an opportunity for some litigations?)

Backups appear to be the "black hole" in GDPR, as nobody spent the 2 years actually planning and preparing. Therefore, most people I've spoken to are planning to simply add a "gdpr_deleted" flag to each row in the database, and set it to true when it happens. They don't return those rows in queries. The inter-dependent nature of many databases (you shared a post with 10 users, you delete your account now, FB wants to retain the view records), coupled with nobody taking GDPR seriously until the last minute, means we'll likely see "soft deletes" for quite some time.

It would be interesting though to make a GDPR request to companies for data held specifically on backups, and held in databases records that would normally not be shown (i.e. these hidden records), as that could get them in trouble if you could prove they lied!

[greenleafjacob]

> Backups appear to be the "black hole" in GDPR

To delete backed up data, first encrypt the data with a key. To delete the data, delete the encryption key, leaving your "backed up data" meaningless bits.