The Death of Data: Retention, Rot, and Risk

Hoarding is only really painful when we run out of space. In a world with very cheap data storage, it never occurs to us that we should be getting rid of data instead of just storing it in giant silos. I'll explain why we are storing increasingly dangerous poison in our databases, and why we ought to care about automated de-acquisition and deletion.

This talk is not about data in the abstract, it's about ergot poisoning and hoarding and konmari and bitrot. When and why to kill your precious data, why data is a double-edged sword.

No one tells developers and project managers to throw things away. We assume that because it's cheap to keep it around, the emotional comfort is worth the tradeoff. But we're not thinking about how vulnerable we make ourselves by not having an automated and tested way of getting rid of things that we don't need anymore.

I want to problematize keeping deprecated codebases around, and emphasize that mindless retention of data and code just increases our threat surfaces for attack and data corruption. Attackers in the future may be motivated by both ideology and money, and we are responsible for that.

About Heidi Waterhouse

Heidi is a developer advocate with LaunchDarkly. She delights in working at the intersection of usability, risk reduction, and cutting-edge technology. One of her favorite hobbies is talking to technologists about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her conference dresses so that she's sure there is a pocket for the mic.

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