Bitcoin Forum

I value my privacy and I want to know what information is safe on this forum, even from admins. If I deletes a post, is it really deleted? If I delete PM, is it really deleted? etc. Please someone give me the information as to what is saved and what is not. Thank you.

Four moderators and no one can help me?

I would say nothing is deleted for good as soon as it touches the database.
But don't take my word for it. theymos will answer you for sure.
Don't complaint about people who don't have definite answers not giving them to you.

I am not complaining, but I apologise for my impatience. So then it's safe to say that nothing is safe and nothing is private here?

You should assume that nothing is safe, yes.

Deleted posts can still be seen by admins, cannot be seen by moderators nor users. Deleted pms will be deleted, but the receiver would still have a copy which he could share with admin via report to admin.

They could also be accessed via the (encrypted) database backups if nothing else.

By they, do you mean deleted posts or deleted pms or both?

I think it would most likely be both as presumably they are both stored in the DB.

Yes, both.

In the case where both the sender and receiver delete the pm, it is still accessible through the database backups, yes?

Thank you all for the help. I am starting to understand how it works around here.

Nothing to do with this site in particular - any Forum that uses a DB (and are there any that don't?) will always have the entire history of anything stored in the DB in the DB log (this is how DB's that support ACID tx's work).

Even if the log is truncated after every backup it is common practice to backup the current log along with the DB so that if all backups have been kept then it is always possible to do a complete rebuild of the DB from an initial DB and all the backed up logs.

Like he said, that's the way it works on any forum. Everything is accessible from the database, and yes that would include pms.

It's always safe to assume that nothing you post on a forum (or the internet) can be removed entirely.

That will depend on how long the backups are kept as well.  If its only a rolling 4 weeks, for example, and the logs are also truncated after 4 weeks, realistically, there's a 2 month window.

True - it very much depends upon how long backups are kept (for my own systems I have backups going back 10 years but perhaps they don't burn backups to CD-R for this forum).

If you want absolute assurance of what information is persistent -- just assume that anything you send or post could be copied, recovered, and/or reposted by someone else.

i'ld ask for a full refund if i were you.


it probably works like this.  if the admin wants to know something that was ever posted, pm'd or accessed, presume this is available online or recoverable from backups.  if the admin is being forced to divulge something that was posted, pm'd or accessed (e.g., if given a subpoena), then a retention policy would be produced and any records beyond that are no longer accessible.

Deleted posts are almost never removed from the database. A PM is removed from the database if the sender and all recipients delete it.

Full database backups are created daily, and all global moderators and admins can download the (encrypted) backups and implement their own rotation policies.

Encrypted as in "they can download the backup to have it at multiple locations, but it's useless for them because they don't have the decryption key",
or encrypted as in "they can download and unpack the backup to read through everything, including PM's, because they too have the keys"?

If it's the second, then this is a huge privacy and security failure.

This.

Only me, Gavin, Satoshi, and Sirius can decrypt it.

If you want privacy, just use PGP.

This.

I send and receive GPG protected PM everyday.  Nobody can read them except the person(s) with the appropriate private key.

nothing in plaintext is private on the internetz

Web crawlers are not new and one is built into a very common browser.

Do you mean Chrome? And built by Google?

This is another good point.  Even if the admins internally deleted posts/messages and ensured no lingering data in backups and periodically destroyed the archive media to prevent recovery it doesn't really matter if the website ends up in the public cache of search engines.

If you want something to be private use technology which keeps it private (like GPG).

The pms aren't google indexable unless you're giving the google spider your credentials.

Just act under the assumption everything you send to the Internet is not private (sometimes, even passwords!) and cannot be fully deleted (just like you can't go back in time and mute what you said IRL), and you'll be fine (or you'll become a maniac, not sure...).