Deleting messages

The aleph cloud protocol is GDPR-compliant. To achieve this objective, we allow users to delete their own data. This is implemented using a special message type called FORGET. By sending a FORGET message, users can delete one or more messages from the entire aleph cloud network. Users can forget any type of message, except for FORGET messages themselves.

When a FORGET message is processed by a node, it will immediately mark the target message(s) as forgotten, meaning that their content (and item_content) fields will be deleted. In addition, any content related to the forgotten message(s) will be deleted, if no other message points to the same content. For example, forgetting a STORE message will delete the associated file, if no other STORE message points to the same file.

Furthermore, forgotten messages will no longer appear when querying messages from /api/v0/messages.json.