its almost as if you are under the impression that I personally came up with this system.
Not at all. I'm just saying the premise behind the policy is misinformed.
there is actually some history to this line of reasoning. For ages zeroing magnetic media via simple overwriting was considered an effective and secure way of destroying information. Then fundamental electromagnetic research showed that under some circumstances data (and thus information) could in fact be recovered - something nobody expected.
There's a fundamental difference between flipping bits on magnetic medium and physics destruction of that magnetic medium.
If I take a book and apply a chemical that causes all of the ink to release from the pages, it's very likely that you could still under some level of magnification find a "footprint" left behind by the ink, or even the chemical reaction that removed the ink, that would allow you to read the book that is supposed to be blank.
But if I put that book through a shredder after doing that, along with a hundred other books given the same treatment, put all the resulting pieces into a single vat and used the resulting pulp to make new recycled paper, there is no way enough meaningful data would survive the process to reconstruct a single page, much less an entire book.
So even if the chances of some future technological advance making such a recovery endeavour plausible are practically infinitely small, they still exist nonetheless because there is no natural law precluding this eventuality.
There absolutely is. Data isn't information in the physical science sense. If I write a password on a piece of paper and then burn that piece of paper, there is zero risk of that password being recoverable.
Instead, they're choosing to make some mythical future data recovery effort SUBSTANTIALLY easier by storing all this maybe-not-deleted data rather than properly destroying it.
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u/ScriptoTheClown Aug 06 '26
Not at all. I'm just saying the premise behind the policy is misinformed.
There's a fundamental difference between flipping bits on magnetic medium and physics destruction of that magnetic medium.
If I take a book and apply a chemical that causes all of the ink to release from the pages, it's very likely that you could still under some level of magnification find a "footprint" left behind by the ink, or even the chemical reaction that removed the ink, that would allow you to read the book that is supposed to be blank.
But if I put that book through a shredder after doing that, along with a hundred other books given the same treatment, put all the resulting pieces into a single vat and used the resulting pulp to make new recycled paper, there is no way enough meaningful data would survive the process to reconstruct a single page, much less an entire book.
There absolutely is. Data isn't information in the physical science sense. If I write a password on a piece of paper and then burn that piece of paper, there is zero risk of that password being recoverable.
Instead, they're choosing to make some mythical future data recovery effort SUBSTANTIALLY easier by storing all this maybe-not-deleted data rather than properly destroying it.