671781 - Delete users outright

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, defect, P3)

Comment 1

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

Deleting a user object outright creates serious risk of DB integrity errors. A revision, for example, has a Foreign Key pointing to the Users table, identifying its author. (Actually, it has 2, one for its author and one for its approver). Deleting the user can quickly produce a FK cascade, if a user has created revisions that other revisions are based on, etc. And thanks to the Document.current_revision circular FK constraint, you can, in fact, end up deleting entire documents and all their history.

Scrubbing all personalized data, including the profile, email address, password hash, etc, is safer. And the user's data is as effectively gone as if we'd deleted the table row completely, as those overwrites are non-recoverable.

Comment 2

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

In the time since comment 1, I've spoken with Tom from Privacy about this. We have a set of recommendations that are sufficient, from their point of view. I'll dig them up and add them here when I can.