A thought on deleting LiveJournal accounts

[redbird]

I know a bunch of people who are deleting their LiveJournal accounts because they're worried about the servers now being in Russia. One of them noted that they didn't want their private data being available for Putin's use.

That strikes me as a good reason not to put anything private on LJ from now on, but what's there is there. I commented:

Don't count on SUP to actually overwrite or otherwise get rid of the data if you delete a journal. Keeping the files while claiming they were gone wouldn't even be technically difficult: the software is already supposed to keep the contents of deleted journals for 30 days in case you change your mind. My inexpert hunch is that deleting an individual entry, or editing it to replace your private content with quotes from Shakespeare or Alice in Wonderland or the first umpteen digits of pi is more likely to actually get rid of the data.

Comments

[tim]

> My inexpert hunch is that deleting an individual entry, or editing it to replace your private content with quotes from Shakespeare or Alice in Wonderland or the first umpteen digits of pi is more likely to actually get rid of the data.

Doubtful. They have backups.

+1 on not trusting them to actually obliterate the data. (Personally I don't see a reason to believe that data on servers in the US are safe either, given the incoming regime, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[necturus]

No data anywhere on the Internet is "safe". However, I'd sooner trust my data to Putin than to Facebook.

[erik]

LJ has been owned by SUP for years, and they've been in the Russian government's back pocket for years. Not only has that train left the station, it's been so long that no one rides trains anymore.

[redbird]

Some of the discussion I've read in the last few days says that they said no to information requests from the Russian government within in the last couple of years; so this is a change in either what they're doing, or what they're admitting to doing, with information.

The deletion of pro-Ukraine journals is certainly a change in who is allowed to use the service, and the DDoS attacks also imply that they weren't in the government's back pocket until recently.

[snippy]

I've assumed from nearly the first weeks I used the Internet that nothing would disappear forever (except the stuff I actually wanted to keep, see, e.g., Deja News) and tried to follow the old rule about never putting anything online you wouldn't want your [boss/mother/neighbor/partner/child] to read. Still, some of us paid for extra privileges, and maybe counted on getting them. I'm slowly deleting individual entries, but so far happy to discover nothing that would be compromising if released to the public.

[azurelunatic]

As other commenters have said, it would presumably still be there in backups, but I'd agree with you and go for individual entry deletion.

I don't know all the internal details, but whole-journal deleted content goes away off the LiveJournal-based platforms when the "purge" task is run; it's only gone from the current site after that happens. At the time when I was volunteering tech support there, it was a resource-intensive job and would happen infrequently and was manually initiated at a time when nothing much else was going on. It would sweep up any deleted journals that were marked as eligible to be expunged. (Some people took advantage of that infrequency, and were lax about undeleting-and-deleting-again if they wanted to be in the deleted-but-not-purged limbo. Sometimes this backfired on them if there was finally a purging run and they let it sit too long.)

Specific entry deleted content goes away pretty much immediately, though I've no idea how the change is made on the disk.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Meh. This is why I don't post sensitive personal info online, period.