Investigators pulled video from ‘residual data’ in Google’s systems — here’s how that was possible and what it means for your privacy.
While this case shows recovery is technically possible, it also shows it’s rare, resource-intensive, and reserved for extraordinary circumstances.
How does this show “it’s rare, resource-intensive, and reserved for extraordinary circumstances” when that’s entirely based upon the word of the people doing it in secret?
“Google is notoriously uncooperative with law enforcement; they will comply with search warrants, but in the least helpful way possible and they will fight it,” he says.
Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE
“Google has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” it read. The email advised Jon that the “legal process” was an administrative subpoena, issued by DHS. Soon, government agents would arrive at his home.
The subpoena wasn’t approved by any judge, and it didn’t require probable cause. Google gave Jon just seven days to challenge it in federal court — not nearly enough time for someone without a crack team of lawyers on retainer. Even more maddeningly, neither Google nor DHS had sent him a copy of the subpoena itself, leaving Jon and his attorney in the dark.
This article reeks of whitewashing for the government and tech industry.
It sure does. It’s an article about your deleted data being accessible by Google engineers then spends the rest of the article backtracking.
The fact that giant companies keep your data and don’t delete it when you tell them to has been true since the beginning of social media. Your things are not deleted, they’re simply marked as deleted so you don’t see them. The actual binary data never goes anywhere.
The rule of thumb is that if the data leaves your possession then assume someone has a copy of it. If it is encrypted and you don’t control your keys then it isn’t encrypted. (See: Bitlocker keys and Microsoft)
IDK this just looks like ICE kidnapped her. Has anyone checked the concentration camps?
They really do just look like a cartel: https://youtu.be/EG7bqoDJ9L4
Eh, either that specialist doesn’t understand how cloud storage works or the author isn’t doing a good job of explaining it. Because it sounds like the specialist figured out how deletions work on your home computer’s hard disk and tried to shove that into some info they searched for on the internet about distributed storage or sharding. What was described is absolutely not how that data is stored in the cloud. The question of “when is my data actually deleted” is completely valid but the explanation is a mashed together pile of dog shit.
Google likely stores small clips of the full video stream (which they did explain) but in object storage. These clips are probably used for training AI and deleted after some period of time according to a retention policy that might soft delete the data first before removing it permanently. And maybe they do replicate the data to keep it safe, but also maybe not since it’s just for training. Since the customer didn’t have a plan that included storage, there’s no reason for them to persist the data after they’ve trained with it. It’s just a waste of storage space costing them money at that point.
They could also store the clips in block storage but all those little pieces on the filesystem would be in the same data center, maybe region, but definitely not all across the world for a single file.
And I guarantee you there was no forensic analysis on any storage devices for this. The reason it took so long to retrieve was probably from back and forth with the feds and deliberation within Google’s legal and management teams. Then once that was sorted, some poor prick probably had to manually dig through some services to find the file and grab it.
TL;DR: Google does hold onto your data longer than most people think but that “expert” doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Bureaucracy and manual processes likely drug out the process, not forensic analysis.
