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Not EVER presenting one customer's data to another customer is a basic part of any business involving multiple customers. In our case we store the UserId in every database table along with the other data, and validate that against the actual logged in user before returning it. It's why I was so horrified at a bug in Cyrus IMAPd replication which occasionally overwrote files belonging to other users.

And it's why you are wrong. Giving the same data back to the same user (holding their blocks) would be fine - but allowing customer data to be read by other customers, for any reason, is bad practice in any area of business.

In many sane jurisdictions, the practice when selling something is to factor the cost of eventual disposal or recycling into the initial purchase cost. This is required by law, for example deposits on drink bottles which can be redeemed by returning the bottle.

In your case, the honest thing to do would be to factor the eventual cleanup of data from the disk into the initial purchase cost of the service. So the cost to provision a VM would include the wipe cost.

Pointing out that you don't do that is a community service. Congratulations to the author of the post for noticing the issue and bringing it to everyone's attention. Now we can all make an informed decision.




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