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vortep
I left my tenure at Google with this same impression. Data is constantly being copied, denormalized, cached and transformed. It is true that efforts are made to leave an audit trail that could in theory be followed from initial source data to all derivatives. However, this is practically infeasible and certainly not doable with a single engineer’s worth of knowledge about the system.
TillE
It must be trivial to find where a copy of data lives. That just needs basic tools to trace a request. I can understand that finding every copy of some data is non-trivial, though.
vortep
Good point. I was thinking of the task of deleting all of a user's data upon request.
alexalx666
just start using AWS and you will not know where anything is in no time
phoenixreader
AWS has products like AWS Macie that shows you where your personal info is.
dmz73
It seems to be very easy to write these kind of sensational titles, ask the question and regardless of what the answer is, the title sounds alarming: "Meta Doesn't Know Where All Your Data Is, Engineers Say" vs "Meta Knows Where All Your Data Is, Engineers Say"