Once It’s Out There…

By Guy Bunker | May 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment

… You can never get it back. I have written before on the fact that the Internet never forgets, but it is back in the news again this week – and people really shouldn’t be surprised.

Now ‘deleted‘ Tweets are easy to find, and deleted pictures can be foundon social network sites. Systems are becoming more complex and as a way to improve availability, data is copied around, with copies held in different locations. All good news if you want to keep stuff safe – but very tough when you want to delete it. A lot of systems don’t track where all the copies are, so when you delete one, the others remain, in other cases, the link (URL) is removed but the data remains, so if you know the name then you can still find the image. Furthermore, if systems are backed up, then the data will still be in the backup – and could be restored at a later date, and finally, search engines also cache web pages, so you could find the data there as well.

All-in-all, if the data is out on the Internet, then it is no longer private and it is impossible to delete. This might cause a few wry smiles but the issue is the same for those businesses looking at cloud computing. What happens when you move from one service provider to another, is there a guarantee that the data has been properly removed and all copies destroyed from the original provider? Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies can be deployed to monitor for data leaks and prevent them from happening, but that is not the usual case. Something to ask your service provider… “Can you prove that my data has been properly managed and deleted?”, “Would you know if my data had been leaked from your service?”

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