What Happens When You (Digitally) Delete Content?

The power to make mistakes and turn back the hand of time is arguably the finest feature of digital technology; it’s what enables netizens to move fast, break things, and iterate over and over with minimal consequences. When auto manufacturers make mistakes, they recall their cars and it costs them a lot of money. When netizens make mistakes digitally, they delete the mistake(s) and life goes on…. or does it? 🧐.

In today’s publication, we’ll be looking at what happens when you delete content digitally, how it impacts databases or storages (where the content resides), we’ll cover things from both text, multimedia, local, and online content as well as important things you need to know regarding the deletion process and why you need to be careful digitally.

The short answer is that when you delete text or multimedia content online, it doesn’t go away until the owner(s) of the application (that you deleted it on) choose to make it go away, also, when you delete multimedia content locally, it doesn’t go away until the space it occupies in your memory storage is overwritten.

Understanding How Text And Text-Like Data Are Stored Online

With regards to text and text-like content online, these typically (but not always) sit on a relational database that has a graphical interface that looks like a spreadsheet. For this explanation, we will assume that you and a friend have registered on an application with just your first name and last name, below is a barebones view of what it would look like on a database.

You must have noticed that while you and your friend only provided just your first name and last name, there are four columns in the table and one of these columns is named ‘IsDeleted’. 'IsDeleted’ is a column that accepts boolean (true or false) values and stores this data as 1s and 0s where 0 is false and 1 is true. Using the information I just provided, you can deduce the fact that each user’s information is not deleted because ‘IsDeleted’ is set to false (0) for both rows of data.

This is how a lot of data sits on databases (especially for platforms that want to track content). When you create content that can be stored in text or text-like form, it would be represented on a database in a manner that is similar to the above with a default ‘IsDeleted’ value of false (0) which means that the value is not deleted. Should you decide to delete/request the deletion of the data on the database, the IsDeleted row for that data changes from 0 to 1, which means ‘IsDeleted’ changes from ‘False’ to ‘True’.

A lot of these requests to add or delete information are facilitated by APIs that receive your requests and pass them on to the database for results. Typically, these requests to the database only return results (to the average netizen) where the ‘IsDeleted’ is false (0). What this means is that when you delete your content, it simply registers on the database row with ‘IsDeleted’ column set to 1 rather than removing the row entirely from the database.

This can mean that average users will not have access to the data, but special users, or the administrator(s) of the database can easily access the data you thought you wiped off the internet. Note that some databases are not set up to do this, some have no ‘IsDeleted’ column as such requests for deletion are effected through a data purge, however, companies that rely heavily on user-generated data and are subject to audits typically retain data (deleted or otherwise) longer than the users give them permission to.

Understanding How Multimedia Data Are Stored Locally

When you take offline pictures, audio, or video recordings, that multimedia content is written to your device storage, this can be a memory card, hard drive, or device storage mechanism. That in itself is just a tray of memory spaces that the content occupies. When you decide to delete your multimedia content, your device tells your file manager/file allocation table/file registry that the space that the multimedia content occupies is free for use.

Let us imagine the eggs in the image below are your multimedia content and the container holding the eggs is your storage memory, every content you make occupies a space in the container (holding the eggs), if you delete one of your content, your device doesn’t go into the container to remove the egg, it simply registers the space (that the egg occupies as) as free for use, this means that if you have another egg, it can be kept in the place where the deleted egg currently occupies (because that location has been marked as free for use).

As long as your deleted data has not been overwritten (by newer data), it will remain in your device memory for as long as your device memory is operational. You will not be able to see it ordinarily because your file manager/file management system only shows you content that you did not delete. Computer forensics investigators or other people who have an interest in these things will be able to see those files by using tools that make it possible to do so and by looking at the slack space on your device’s memory.

Understanding How Multimedia Data Are Stored Online

Scalable multimedia data storage will typically leverage CDNs to ensure high availability and quick delivery to users all around the globe. Explaining how this works would leverage the knowledge you’ve gotten from how texts are stored online as well as how multimedia data is stored locally. It is hybrid because the application (eg social media or blog platform) that you upload your multimedia content to is outsourcing the storage of the said content to CDN.

When content is stored using CDNs, the CDN typically returns a URL link to the uploaded content (among other metadata). That URL link can then be stored on a database such that whenever you need the content you uploaded, the application retrieves it using the URL link that was provided by the CDN. A simple example of how the URL link is stored on a database is shown below.

The data in the FileUrl column is what is returned by the CDN for each upload of multimedia content, if you decide to delete multimedia content that you uploaded, what may end up happening is that the IsDeleted for that row of data may end up being changed from 0 (False) to 1 (True) rather than the entire row of data being removed from the database.

What should be the ideal outcome (when you delete multimedia content that you uploaded) is that the application (that stored your multimedia content on a CDN) should initiate a request to the CDN to delete that content, after which the entire row of data (on the database) related to the content should also be deleted. Some regulated industries cannot implement this due to audit concerns.

Where it gets even more shocking is that even if the above idea outcome were effected, the multimedia content will remain on the local storage device that the CDN used to store the content until it is overwritten by another content or the storage device is destroyed. This is why the saying “the internet never forgets” remains quite apt.

A Relatable Explanation

Remember the Law of Conservation of Mass? it simply states that mass is neither created nor destroyed in an ordinary chemical reaction, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it can change in form. This law is also applicable to most events involving input and output. With computers and the digital world, however, content can be created, it’s just a lot harder to destroy it as it mostly changes form or is rearranged.

Your chats, pictures, videos, voice notes, public comments, browser history, downloaded content, etc, are all content that can exist on the local device and/or the internet despite your best attempts to delete them (when you believe that they no longer serve you). The delete functionalities on your device or your favourite application are there to give you a sense of security, things are hardly ever truly deleted.

The entire internet is just a finite number of processors and storage devices that are relatively easy to access by netizens as such it is highly unlikely that what you deleted is destroyed beyond recovery. Some of you may have noticed that there are times on social media when a post has been deleted and it’s still viewable on the social media platform albeit with a disclaimer that explains that the post has been deleted.

The above is an example that can be explained using the term caching, caching can be implemented by an application by using your local device storage and/or the server (hosting the application) storage device. Caching typically has a duration and when the duration of the cache is exceeded, the content will have to be loaded by asking the application for the current state of the content. If the content has been ‘deleted’, you won’t be able to see or access the content anymore.

Finally

GDPR has gone a long way to attempt to ensure your digital protection, however, you have to be careful about the content you put out online, you must be mentally prepared for the reality that even if you delete what you posted, it may hover around forever and this should be sobering enough to make you weigh the long-term impact of your digital footprint along with your readiness to defend your action(s). The only way to ensure content cannot be used against you is to not create the content in the first place, this also applies to your actions online.