Can We Really Remove Our Internet Footprint?

In the current day and age, the bulk of peoples' lives are stored on the Internet. Whether it be pictures, location check-ins, or Tweets, a large portion of our life is sitting on a server in a massive data center. Individuals carelessly dump information about themselves onto various sites, with no regard for the repercussions of their actions. What they do not realize is that their data is stored on servers owned by corporations. Once they click the "Submit" button, the data is no longer lives solely on their computer or cell phone.

Uneducated individuals may think, "It's okay, when I delete this status update it will be gone forever!" However, there is a lot of information they're lacking. First and foremost, all companies make backups of their servers, and have redundancy across multiple data centers. When companies like Google and Amazon perform backups, the data is saved on physical tape disks, and put into storage. Google has never commented publicly on the data that they take physical backups of, but for redundancy purposes, there is most likely personal information in there somewhere. When an image is deleted from Google+, or a YouTube video is taken down, it may appear as gone forever, but there is a good chance it still exists.

Throughout my several years of web development, I have come across several different database designs in regards to handling "deleted" data. Let's say John, a user, has an account on a website. He sends a message to the website's administrator, requesting his account be deleted. Following the design patterns that I have seen, the administrator can do one of two things:

1. Actually drop the record from the database. Assuming the OnDelete behaviors are set correctly on other database tables, John's primary record is deleted, and that deletion cascades to other records associated with his account that might be stored in other tables.
2. Mark the record as "deleted". Depending on the website's backend, missing records and accounts marked as deleted may act in the same manner. By marking the account as deleted, the data is still retained, but it gives off the appearance that the account is completely gone.

Another perspective to consider is information sharing. Over the past several years, information sharing has become a hot topic between corporations. In Google's Privacy Policy, it says, "We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures." This essentially means that if Google is partners with a company, and trusts them, there is a possibility personal information will be sent to the second company. The specifics of how this works are unknown; however, the action of copying data to the second company produces another set of servers the data is saved on, making it further difficult to remove.

With the amount that technology has advanced in the passed few years, once an Internet footprint is created, it is there to stay. It may become more difficult to find personal information pertinent to an individual, but it is always saved on the Internet.