It's difficult to teach this lesson to people.<p>It was difficult for me to learn this lesson personally. When I understood it, I deleted my Facebook account (best decision, btw), but I assume that even though my account was deleted there are still references to it all over. IDs in log lines, references not cleaned up -- enough to paint something of a picture of who I was and what I did with the site.<p>Now I'm more judicious in what I share, how I share it, which applications I give permissions. But I'm still leaking metadata everywhere. It's frustrating and terrifying that the cost of participating in our society is either a HUGE cognitive load in keeping an eye on all the data you emit or accepting that basically everyone will have full access to your (meta)data over time.
If @realDonaldTrump deletes a tweet, it's against the Twitter ToS to republish it using a bot.<p>When it does happen I've seen people post screenshots of the old tweet. This doesn't prove anything more than trivial knowledge of the Chrome Web Inspector.<p>I've thought about distributing a program so people can keep their own local archives of important tweets. There are plenty of ways to achieve this already, but that's besides my point.<p>How can we make it obvious when an important figure deletes a tweet without breaking Twitter's ToS?
While its still no silver bullet, encryption can make the problem more manageable. For example for hard drives with full-disk encryption you should be able to just throw away the key and the data should become inaccessible. Same applies to for cloud backups; you don't know what the cloud provider might do with the data you upload, but they should not be able to access the content if it is properly encrypted, and as such the issues raised in the article become lesser.<p>Of course this does not apply to data that is actually being used/processed in cloud instead of just being passively stored.
>That computer, armed with the company’s proprietary wiping software, uses a special algorithm to programmatically access each bit on the drive, stored as either a ‘0’ or ‘1,’ and write a new digit to it. The process must be repeated at least three times and with different numbers to be up to DoD standards.<p>Maybe a stupid question, but why don't they just write every bit to either 1 or 0 regardless of its current content? Are they trying to preserve some data and not others? Why do you need to do it multiple times if the bit being written is independent of the actual contents?