Does anyone have any insight on what actually happens to this data? Is it really deleted or just stored in a warehouse somewhere inaccessible to me but accessible to some snooping government or hacker?
They will probably put it in some archive where they delete it after 10 years. Or they keep it somewhere on a drive where it could be accessed but will never be, since no one has a reason to use the data.
Even if it was actually deleted, it's still in the backups somewhere. Even if it's not in the backups, the NSA SSD firmware copied it off to unused hidden blocks. Even if it didn't, the NSA has tools to recover data, even after multiple passes of file wiping.
Nobody ever deletes data anymore. They didn't physically destroy all devices with a copy? They still have it.
Hard to say where the data could end up. If someone pulled the drive and kept it, it could sit around for years doing nothing. It if it immediately got to a black hat it could be sold off on the darknet. Probably not for millions though.
Is there away to prove the data is actually deleted? It's not really gone forever is it, just removed from the search index. Other copies will have been made by various agencies. I suppose for most purposes thats ok, but not all.
Do they actually delete the files? Or do they just remove public access to them, but keep them on their servers?
Maybe they send the data to law enforcement automatically? (I've heard that they do that for child pornography; maybe they do, or could do, the same for terrorist material as well.)
From watching a tech talk a few years ago by Googler on backup, my understanding is that they just delete the encryption key (I believe everyone's data is encrypted with a per user key).
Your data may still live out on some server - but it is effectively unrecoverable.
They are probably not explicitly lying about what information they retain. If they say they deleted it, well, it's probably at least inaccessible to production systems.
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