Given their business model of sifting through and selling your data this doesn't seem all that likely that they've left it in gigantic combined flatfiles.

It seems more likely to me that yes, they could do a DELETE FROM BROWSING_HISTORY WHERE USER = "%S", but that's not their business model. Instead they have to add a column to the database that flags data that will be shown to the user or not, and then go through every part of the site where the data might be visible and add a check for that flag. It's a lot more work, and worse they have to get it right the first time because people will be angry if there is a leak somewhere and their supposedly deleted data is visible.

Or, maybe, making a product which has to deal with legacy code for billions of users is actually difficult?

Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?

> Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?

People keep saying this and they keep being surprised.

I don't know man when they wanted to generate a highlight video of new year's resolution for each user and they went from 0 to executed in a few days and blogged about it they seemed very capable people.

I would call supporting genocide for years and helping to drown democracy in a number of countries (Hungary, Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka among others) pretty fucking evil.

Blowing vile, antisemitic dog whistles from the very top level also doesn't do much in order to improve their image

This is event steam data, at what large tech company do you work for where you can possibly store that in a SQL database? At my current company our clickstream data is in the petabytes, Facebook has orders of magnitude more. It’s probably stored in HDFS or something, not too far from chronological flat files.

It's probably not just stored as gigantic combined flatfiles, but imagine what would happen if they launched this feature and it only actually deleted some copies of the user's browsing history.

I did some parsing of their other dumpster-fire PR-speak today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714352

At this rate, I predict a John Oliver segment taking apart their abuse of the English language in about a month.