Does facebook really remove your deleted photos???

The term social network is no longer a stranger for many of us. More and more people seem to understand the concept behind this interesting network and have joined them. You might have joined Facebook, MySpace and other networks. However with the rising popularity of the social networks, you might consider deleting all those images which your loved ones might not approve. If you think that by just deleting the images you are safe, that might be true in some cases and false in other cases, depending on the particular social network from which you have deleted your undesirable images.

Jacqui Cheng of  Ars technica shared with us an interesting fact related to this issue: Are deleted images actually deleted. The answer to this important question is In some cases images are deleted and in some cases they are not. This significant fact was discovered by the researchers at Cambridge University last month (June). The researchers came to know a very undesirable fact that the deleted images from the social network are often found left on the server, thus exposing the image to the risk of being misused.

Ars Technica set to test this founding out by themselves and what they discovered was quite surprising : a few popular sites do keep the images delelted by the users on their servers. On 21st May 2009, they deleted a few images from the four most popular and widely used sites by their members and readers and monitored them for 6 weeks. The networks that were monitored include

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• MySpace

The result of the monitoring process is one that carries both the good news and the bad news. Coming to the bad news, Facebook and MySpace were found to be the guilty party and the deleted images were still existent on the server. The team behind Ars Technica talked to the respective networks on this issue. Amy Walgenbach, spokesperson of MySpace told Ars via email:

MySpace takes the safety, security and privacy of its users very seriously and immediately deletes user content and profiles in their entirety when requested to.We are aware it can take longer for images to be removed from third party servers (servers from the vendor we work with) and are actively working to address this

On a similar note, Facebook revealed the fact that even third party servers could not access the information even if it is uploaded on the server. Facebook’s spokesperson Elizabeth Linder said:

As stated in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, the governing document for the site, ‘when you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).We are working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist.

In an effort to end this post in a pleasant manner, let us come to the good news. The good news is that Twitter and Flickr delete the images within a matter of seconds and direct links to the photos are broken.

Well the lesson that you can take from this post is pretty clear. One can’t determine when will if ever Facebook and MySpace will resolve this issue. So in these circumstances the best thing to do is to avoid uploading questionable photos. Before uploading any photo, think twice about the consequences of uploading your images.