Erasure

The definition

Authorized deletion of stored memory: honoring a deletion request, making sure the removed fact stops influencing answers, and being able to show it is gone. Distinct from decay, which drops information a system judges less useful.

The same words the glossary hub and the public data mirror carry; this page is the stable address for the term.

Related terms

• Memory

  The store of facts, preferences, and records a system keeps so it doesn’t start from nothing each time. What is stored — distinct from which stored facts are…

• Continuity Framework

  This site's framework (v2.0, November 2026) for judging whether a system has continuity: five obligations a continuity layer owes the people and systems that…

• Retention policy

  A rule that ends a fact's validity, or removes it, on a schedule or on an event, without anyone asking. Expiry is a policy; the record may still exist until…

• Deletion receipt

  A signed, checkable statement that a deletion was carried out: what was removed, when, to which rung of the erasure ladder, and under which key or policy.…

• Erasure ladder

  This site's ordering of the twelve operations the word “forget” is used for, from correcting a wrong record to verifying that a deleted one no longer shapes…

• Ghost vectors

  Embeddings that a vector database marked deleted but kept on disk. In 2026 tests, flagged vectors read from ChromaDB, FAISS and Weaviate storage files were…

• Access-control erasure

  Withdrawing a record from everyone who could read it while the operator keeps the data and could still decrypt it. The IETF SAIHM draft requires operators to…

• Right to erasure

  Under GDPR Article 17, the right to have personal data erased without undue delay in defined cases, with a duty on the controller to inform others processing…

Where it shows up on this site

• The erasure ladder · ReferenceTwelve things forget can mean, from a correction to verified non-influence
• CCL — Context Continuity Layer · WatchlistContext governance and verifiable erasure. Context Layer Systems, Inc., founded by Morgan Allen, describes CCL as “a post-authentication context governance and infrastructure layer” and an open architectural standard, with STACCR as its pre-GA implementation. The site says only encrypted token references pass through the system and that destroying a subject's key is designed to make that context inaccessible, backed by a signed erasure certificate.