This. It's the same innocence of people who believe when you delete a document on Google/META/Apple/Microsoft servers, it "really" gets deleted. Google most likely has a backup of every piece of information indexed by them in the last 20 years or so. It would cause envy to the Internet Archive.

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giancarlostoro 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

With the privacy laws out there, I do genuinely think they eventually get purged even from backups. I remember there being a really cool YouTube video shared here on HN that google no longer has publicly, it was about the process of an email and all the behind the scenes things, like physical security into a data center, to their patented hard drive shredders they use once the hard drives are to be tossed. I wish Google had kept that video public and online, it was a great watch.

I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.

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diggan 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.

That's not what Discord themselves say, is that coming from Discord, the police or someone else?

> Once you delete content, it will no longer be available to other users (though it may take some time to clear cached uploads). Deleted content will also be deleted from Discord’s systems, but we may retain content longer if we have a legal obligation to preserve it as described below. Public posts may also be retained for 180 days to two years for use by Discord as described in our Privacy Policy (for example, to help us train models that proactively detect content that violates our policies). - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/5431812448791-...

Seems to be something that decides if the content should be deleted faster, or kept for between 180 days - 2 years. So even for Discord, "once you delete something on Discord its poof" isn't 100% accurate.

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giancarlostoro 4 days ago | parent [-]

At least in terms of reporting content to "Trust and Safety" they certainly behave like its gone forever. I have had friends report illegal content, to both Discord and law enforcement, the take away seemed like it was gone, now it's making me wonder if Discord is really archiving CSAM material for two years and not helping law enforcement unless a proper warrant is involved, yikes.

	▲	diggan 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> now it's making me wonder if Discord is really archiving CSAM material for two years and not helping law enforcement unless a proper warrant is involved Yes, of course, to both of those. Discord is a for-profit business with limited amount of humans who can focus on things, so the less they can focus on, the better (in the mind of the people running the business at least). So why do anything when you can do nothing, and everything stays the same? Of course when someone has an warrant, they really have to do something, but unless there is, there is no incentive for them to do anything about it.

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conradev 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My understanding is that for Gmail specifically, they keep a record of every email ever received regardless of deletion status, but I'm not able to find any good sources.

	▲	diggan 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Even if Google are not storing it, we can sleep safely as NSA's PRISM V2 probably got an archive of it too :) Albeit hard to acquire a dump of those archives, for now at least...

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bwillard 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Officially, up to you if you believe they are following their policies, all of the companies have published statements on how long they keep their data after deletion (which customers broadly want to support recovery if something goes wrong).

- Google: active storage for "around 2 months from the time of deletion" and in backups "for up to 6 months": https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US

- Meta: 90 days: https://www.meta.com/help/quest/609965707113909/

- Apple/iCloud: 30 days: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/delete-files-mm3b7fcd...

- Microsoft: 30-180 days: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...

So if it ends up that they are storing data longer there can be consequences (GDPR, CCPA, FTC).

	▲	toyg 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		TBH, I'd be surprised if they kept significant amounts around for longer, for the simple reason that it costs money. Yes, drives are cheap, but the electricity to keep them online for months and years is definitely not free, and physical space is not infinite. This is also why some of their services have pretty aggressive deletion policies (like recordings in MS Teams, etc).