Hey all, we have a known issue with pages and reusable elements that were deleted a long time ago reappearing in users apps. This is a one-time problem that occurred on Monday. We believe it should only affect a small number of apps, but I wanted to post about it so that if your app is affected, you know how to handle it.
Basically, what happened is that we used to have two separate lists of all the apps and reusable elements; a big list that contained all the data, and a smaller list with just the names, which we used to quickly generate the page dropdown in the editor. This system was buggy, and the two lists sometimes got out of sync with each other, which caused a lot of issues. On Monday, we replaced it with a new system that automatically regenerates the small list from the big list in a way that makes it much harder for them to get out of sync.
However, certain apps had pages that were deleted from the small list but not the big list. This made it look like the page was deleted, but the app was still storing the data. Because of our change, the small list is now accurate again, and the pages are now showing up.
If this happens to you, it’s safe to just re-delete the page or reusable element that appeared. This is a one-time issue that occurred because of the transition to the new system, which will hopefully be much more reliable going forward.
This raises an interesting question of when and how data is deleted from the bubble server. If a user wants to scrub all information an app has on him/her, I would simply delete the User and any data associated with that user.
In this instance, it sounds like this might not necessarily be how data is stored/deleted on the bubble server. So there could potentially be data still stored, even when the User has been erased from “My” database and I can no longer as the owner of the app see that data?
Could this potentially be a violation of European “Right to erasure” laws (and some other jurisdictions)?
I don’t operate in within the EU borders and, if I understand it correctly, with CloudFlare data will be stored on a server in your home country? But nevertheless it would be nice to have an assurance that when data is deleted from my app, it is in fact deleted from Bubble servers.
A better analogy here is invisible text in a document. If you delete the document, the data is gone, but if the text is invisible and you still have the document, it’s recoverable. Bubble applications are basically stored as documents under the hood, and we can permanently delete them on request, but as long as we’re still storing the document, any information the document contains is still there.
We respect user requests to permanently delete data about them; you can email us at support@bubble.io and we’ll be happy to help.
Thank you Josh! That’s great to know. I guess that changes how I would handle requests from my users to have their data permanently deleted. I suppose if I were to just delete it from my app, it would be hard to pass on information on what data I would like the Bubble team to permanently delete afterwards.
So a better way to handle it on my end would be to mark a user for deletion and then reach out to support for a permanent delete I suppose.
