← All practicals

Exercise your right to be forgotten

A read-only walk through what erasure would take — and what a tamper-evident log keeps anyway.

1. 1

   Open the danger zone at the bottom of your account page and press “Preview what erasure would take”. Nothing is deleted — this is a read.

   The preview is the whole exercise. It is also the only way to SEE the cascade at all: a real erasure signs you out in the same instant it succeeds, so the thing this practical is about is the one thing it could never show you.

2. 2

   Read the categories erasure would walk — passkeys, sessions, your MFA secret, apps you registered, linked identities, SCIM rows, CAEP events, ReBAC tuples, your Academy lesson progress — and then read your OWN numbers underneath.

   The list is complete but abstract; nobody weighs the words “practical progress”. Your own count is what tells you what the operation means. Notice how far it reaches: erasure here also sweeps the sister Academy site’s tables, because one account spans both.

3. 3

   Read what is RETAINED — the anonymized audit skeleton — and find your own events in the X-ray panel.

   The same events and the same timestamps survive, with your identity replaced by a one-way pseudonym. That is the honest reconciliation of “forget the person” with “still prove nothing was tampered with”, and it is the actual subject of this practical.

4. 4

   Read how the account itself ends: the user row is tombstoned rather than dropped, the original email is freed for a fresh signup, and every audit row is repointed at a deterministic pseudonym so “one erased person did N things” stays legible while the person does not.

   Tombstoning is what lets the address be reused without leaving a dangling reference behind, and the deterministic pseudonym is what keeps the log countable without keeping it identifying. Both are design choices you can now describe — which is what this practical is for.