[HN Gopher] German watchdog orders Sam Altman's biometric ID pro...
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German watchdog orders Sam Altman's biometric ID project World to
delete data
Author : belter
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-12-22 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.euronews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.euronews.com)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Will they delete it for real? I feel like many companies either
| just hide the data or have it sitting in older backups, leaving
| everyone's privacy vulnerable.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| I usually wonder if they do that as well. In some cases it may
| be hard to depending on how data is stored. In vertica, a
| database I worked with would never truly delete data on disk.
| delusional wrote:
| That seems like nonsense. Software cannot constrain the
| physical world. I could touch the bits on the drive itself,
| or I could physically destroy the hard-drive. Both would
| "truly delete" the data.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Good luck deleting data from my 5th backup drives that I
| didn't tell you about. It's not hard because destroying a
| hard drive is hard, it's hard because you need to find not
| one, but all of the drives that are likely replicated and
| distributed around the globe already if you ever intended
| to do business with that data.
| post-it wrote:
| It's not a technical problem to solve, it's a legal one.
| If there is a crushing penalty if data that was supposed
| to be deleted shows up one day, companies will find a way
| to delete it.
| im3w1l wrote:
| One issue I foresee is that you can't legislate bugs
| away.
| post-it wrote:
| A bug is just a mistake, and the legal system already
| deals with mistakes in a variety of ways.
| okanat wrote:
| Umm you can. You can force companies to pass their code
| through an examination (even by a third party) and define
| a procedure of ensuring strict data hygiene. If they
| cannot pass each year, they will be subject to fines.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Only marking as "deleted" while indefinitely keeping it is
| illegal in the EU/EEA. The GDPR _requires_ a hard deletion in
| cases like this, but allows a grace period of a few weeks for
| the deletion to propagate throughout systems.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There are backup systems that are write-only. What's to be
| done then?
| polskibus wrote:
| You could replay this backup, and skip problematic record
| when writing new copy of the backup. Delete old backup.
| What's important is to keep such log of ,,records to be
| deleted from backup".
| cyberpunk wrote:
| How does one do this with a 20TB SQL database?
|
| Our approach would be to add some filters into our
| 'restore' pipeline which drops the problematic data
| should we ever attempt a restore, but I don't think it's
| good enough, and we have to maintain a list of user id
| hashes or such to power the filters.
|
| Edit: I mean, in a way that won't eat a lot of costs. I
| can imagine a malicious group opening and demanding
| deletions for 1000s of users which would mean a deletion
| job running on a large number of these 20TB backups, say
| 100 daily backups and for multiple users?
| martijnarts wrote:
| You don't need to delete data instantly, you just need to
| do it within a reasonable timeframe. So batching data
| deletion requests and running a clear out once a week
| should be fine.
|
| You may even be okay to just reply to the user that
| you've deleted all active copies of the data and it'll be
| fully gone when your backups expire in 30 days.
|
| IANAL tho.
| dboreham wrote:
| The acid bath.
| post-it wrote:
| It's imprudent to use technology that makes it impossible
| to comply with the law.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| Simple. Destroy the backup physically.
| fh973 wrote:
| Encrypt it and delete keys.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Encrypt write-once backups and store the keys on
| rewritable backups.
| unit149 wrote:
| Store everything on a decentralized P2P server for
| privacy enhancing technologists (PETs) to deconstruct.
| mtmail wrote:
| Facebook used an encryption key per user for their
| backups. For deletion they just delete the encryption key
| which makes the data unreadable. There was an article
| years ago about their cold storage infrastructure,
| Blueray discs if I recall. https://www.datacenterfrontier
| .com/cloud/article/11431537/in...
| williamdclt wrote:
| I've had a cursory look into that recently (just a simple
| googling) and it seems that it's considered OK to keep
| the data in backups.
|
| Which does seem weird... but to be fair, it would be near
| impossible to delete from backups as they exist today, it
| would be a law that can't be practically applied.
| noprocrasted wrote:
| Illegality matters only if you get caught - and when it
| comes to the GDPR it turns out even "getting caught" isn't
| actually a problem, as the continued existence of Facebook,
| Google, the data broker industry, etc demonstrates.
| pfoof wrote:
| Now imagine backups stored on tapes. How many companies would
| resort to rewinding all of them in search of this single
| record.
| rollcat wrote:
| Easy:
|
| - Rotate old tapes to store the freshest backup (according to
| retention policy)
|
| - Store row ID for each deletion request
|
| - Replay deletions during restore
|
| Either way you want (or already have) a scrubbing procedure
| to import production data into a staging environment, so this
| is not a technical issue.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| Agree.
|
| The file locker site i use said my account was deactivated due
| to inactivity.
|
| But after a simple email pw reset all my uploads are back
| online.
|
| Makes me aware any deletion i do is probably NOT done server
| side.
| oytis wrote:
| At least before GDPR it was a common wisdom among backend
| people that deleting things is just not worth it. I remember
| when I joined an otherwise cloud-focused team as an embedded
| engineer and suggested that we add a way to delete an account
| it was made clear to me that I am asking for an impossible
| thing. I hope GDPR has managed to change something
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| Right. Most all users want the restore option much more
| than a clean delete.
| echelon wrote:
| I was raised in the evangelical south to conservative parents.
|
| World(coin) sounds like it's right out of the plot of some Sunday
| morning preacher's sermons [1] about Revelations and the "mark of
| the Beast".
|
| Central organization scanning people and controlling how they
| transact? Literally the antichrist's M.O.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/zjHrExOM-ww
| oytis wrote:
| Together with the vision of the future where all labour is
| automated and controlled by a few megacorps it paints a truly
| apocalyptic picture
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| I'm a flaming atheist but holy fuck do I get uncomfortable with
| universal IDs and the growing drumbeat of identity
| verification.
|
| Borders, passports, IDs, personal documentation, it's all just
| a modern caste system. Yes, it's uncomfortable to think of a
| world without them but to me, after global warming, digital
| class slavery is probably the second biggest issue of our time.
| So much of the world works because bureaucracy is inefficient
| and non-omniciant, just like humans, yet so many people want
| the world to be one big TSA checkpoint where everyone must be
| unnaturally perfect at all times. It's utopian thinking that is
| leading us towards a type of hell I don't think any of us can
| even begin to imagine.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _Those three codes, which are extremely difficult to break are
| then stored in databases that are owned by third parties, which
| include the University of Berkeley, Zurich, Friedrich-Alexander-
| Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) university and NeverMind_
|
| What do they mean by "Zurich" here?
| javaunsafe2019 wrote:
| I guess university
| Luc wrote:
| ETH Zurich I assume, their Chief Economist is professor
| there.
| btown wrote:
| Press release primary sources from the German watchdog, BayLDA:
|
| https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08_en.pdf (EN)
|
| https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08.pdf (DE)
|
| Quote from the officlal English version:
|
| > As a result, despite the improvements already introduced,
| adjustments are still required to bring the company's data
| processing in line with the applicable provisions Among other
| things, the company will be obliged to provide a deletion
| procedure that complies with the provisions of the GDPR within
| one month of the decision taking effect. In addition, "Worldcoin"
| will be obliged to provide explicit consent for certain
| processing steps in the future. Moreover, the deletion of certain
| data records previously collected without a sufficient legal
| basis was ordered ex officio. The company has already received
| the decision and has informed us that it is going to appeal it.
|
| The allusion to "improvements already introduced" would seem to
| refer (though I'm uncertain of this) to
| https://world.org/blog/announcements/worldcoin-foundation-un... -
| which was described there as "reinforced after conversations with
| data protection authorities focused around further biometric
| template protection, particularly the Bavarian Data Protection
| Authority ("BayLDA"), the Worldcoin Foundation's Lead Supervisory
| Authority in the EU."
|
| Cryptographic systems that ensure no single party can access data
| at rest, even if that party were to be compromised, corrupted, or
| forced to reveal secrets by law enforcement, are absolutely
| incredible technical achievements - but it seems that, at least
| in this case, they are insufficient solutions in the eyes of EU
| regulators. (Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
|
| I hope the stance towards cryptographic erasure evolves
| thoughtfully over time in general, but World's approach here,
| beginning to collect data for seemingly unlimited purposes
| _before_ having a completed system for SMPC, was never going to
| be one that would lend itself towards establishing positive
| regulatory precedent.
| emporas wrote:
| Doesn't Worldcoin produce Zero Knowledge Proofs of biometric
| data? If yes i do not see what kind of personal data the ledger
| may hold. It holds the proof of their data, not their data.
|
| If some people are not aware of ZKP here is a short really like
| [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c6gpq9nKogo
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The history of modern technology is the history of running away
| from government regulation.
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