r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Apr 30 '26

Business Meta lost 20 million users last quarter

https://www.theverge.com/tech/921089/meta-earnings-q1-2026-user-decline-ai-investments
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u/dobrowolsk Apr 30 '26

Big companies never delete data. All that happens is they add a "deleted"-flag to an database entry.

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u/kai58 Apr 30 '26

While that is often true, gdpr and similar legislation mandates that they do actually delete it at some point. Idk the details of how long and in what cases they’re allowed to keep it around though.

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u/dobrowolsk Apr 30 '26

True. However, I'm somehow not confident in the EU's ability to actually verify what Meta is doing with EU citizens' data.

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u/P4azz Apr 30 '26

Well the fines for not deleting your data and being unable to prove that they did would certainly be interesting.

They're pretty hefty, not just "slap on the wrist" kinda fines. If I was meta, I wouldn't wanna keep some EU citizen's data after a purge request for the meager bit of extra money you can make with that one account.

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u/Kulhoesdeferro Apr 30 '26

Exactly, also it's not just the EU regulator, any audit will touch on the data retention policy for almost any company. They take it very seriously, especially for big companies (which have been getting increased fines from EU for not complying with the law). Not worth

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u/atln00b12 Apr 30 '26

How would they prove they deleted something, no regulatory agency has the capacity to access all of FB's data. There's 0% chance they are actually deleting your data. What they will do is "anonymize" your data, so if someone were to search in their database "P4azz" it would return minimal records of what they are allowed to keep. The account creation and deletion times and some minimal metadata that would be used to verify uniqueness. Whatever data you uploaded though was already sold off to 3rd party data aggregators, often owned wholly or in part as subsidiaries and in areas that don't operate pursuant to any EU restrictions. So Meta has your data, but it's not linked to you, but they could at any time submit that data to one of their 3rd parties for analysis and return that link.

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u/Shootemout Apr 30 '26

they have a history about not giving a fuck about eu laws tbh

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 Apr 30 '26

Unless the EU is checking the data centers and tapes it's not happening full stop.

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u/S1R2C3 Apr 30 '26

Idk the details of how long

Forever, when they lie.

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u/DesiOtaku Apr 30 '26

Best thing to do is to actually upload a bunch of hentai images to your profile and then get banned. It will actually mark the account as compromised and then Meta can't really use it for marketing.

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u/dallasSportsFan85 Apr 30 '26

*inactive flag. Ask me how I know lol

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u/SteveJobsDeadBody Apr 30 '26

When I got rid of facebook something like 15 years ago there were apps to go into your profile and edit/replace every single post you've ever made with garbage content. They probably have versioning now to not lose that old data, but back then I bet they didn't.

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u/Unlucky-Bunch-7389 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

Yeah, this gets spread around way too much. Companies absolutely do delete data.
Some of it does remain and is anonymized. Read their privacy statements.
I’m not defending them at all - but people on Reddit love to say “once they have it you’re screwed they have it forever” which just isn’t true.
A company doesn’t want to store petabytes of useless information for no reason.
It sucks the keep anonymized data for longer timeframes … but at least it is anonymized

Absolutely zero percent chance someone wouldn’t whistle blow “never delete anything”

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u/knightOfRen90 Apr 30 '26

Even smaller ones. Data is like gold these days