Luke, On 9/02/2021 12:23 p.m., Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
Archiving information about people without their explicit concent is not legal. oh fer f****'s sake. so if anyone running a cloud server takes it temporarily offline (simply switches off the VM for maintenance purposes) that's ILLEGAL?
I think you understand that this is a completely different issue. The discussion here is about freezing an archive now, storing it for a year and reusing it next year. What you mention is a technical activity with a very limited timespan. You know. There is nothing wrong with information being deleted. Jitsi has a good rule for this: once the last person leaves the room, the room, including all chats, are automatically deleted. I don't exactly know how the matrix rooms work. I guess that when a room is deleted, also all the information is also deleted, but I don't know what happens when a room is never deleted (as happens with most rooms) Is information older then "x" time deleted, or is it stored indefinitely? Anycase, I have noticed that it is not easy to retrieve information from long time ago especially in rooms with a lot of chats-traffic. So, in that case, it is very simple: if the information cannot be retrieved by the user, it has not value to the user, so there is no reason to store that information and -hence- it should be deleted. In that sense, no there is no problem with temporary offline storage of a VM for maintenance purposes, but it is common sense to delete/wipe the temporary storage afterwards. If you company would have a cybersecurity breach and it turns out that person-related information was retrieved from a backup VM image you still have on a server and was not deleted or not encrypted, you'll be in big problems and can count a DGPR fine! So do not underestimate this! Kr.