[FOSDEM] matrix accounts on fosdem.org ... do they stay?

[Kristoff]

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.