If you think that drunken photo you deleted online is gone, think again. There is no such thing as "deleted" in the internet.
Try this: Take a photo and upload it to Facebook or Friendster, then after a day or so, note what the URL to the picture is (the actual photo, not the page on which the photo resides), and then delete it. Come back a month later and see if the link works. Chances are: It will.
Facebook isn't alone here. Researchers at Cambridge University (so you know this is legit, people!) have found that nearly half of the social networking sites don't immediately delete pictures when a user requests they be removed. In general, photo-centric websites like Flickr were found to be better at quickly removing deleted photos upon request.
Why do "deleted" photos stick around so long? The problem relates to the way data is stored on large websites: While your personal computer only keeps one copy of a file, large-scale services like Facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks to manage data and distribution. It's a complex system wherein data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. (Yahoo! Tech is served by dozens of servers, for example.) But because changes aren't reflected across the CDN immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks.
In the case of Facebook, the company says data may hang around until the URL in question is reused, which is usually "after a short period of time." Though obviously that time can vary considerably.
Of course, once a photo escapes from the walled garden of a social network like Facebook, the chances of deleting it permanently fall even further. Google's caching system is remarkably efficient at archiving copies of web content, long after it's removed from the web. Anyone who's ever used Google Image Search can likely tell you a story about clicking on a thumbnail image, only to find that the image has been deleted from the website in question -- yet the thumbnail remains on Google for months. And then there are services like the Wayback Machine, which copy entire websites for posterity, archiving data and pictures forever.
The lesson: Those drunken party photos you don't want people to see? Simply don't upload them to the web, EVER, because trying to delete them after you sober up is a tough proposition.
Categories
Anne Rice
Blog Tips
Books
Call Center Life
Comp and Tech
Dogs
Family and Home
Fashion
Food Trip
Foolish Heart
Friendships
Hollywood
Horror Story
Inspiration
Jokes
Labrador
Living and Loving
Macro Pics
Married Life
Music and Lyrics
News and History
Pathetic Moments
Philippines
Photos
Press Release
Project 365
Shih Tzu
Sophie Kinsella
Sports
Sunsets
Thoughts
Travel
TV and Movie
Website and Tools
Work and Finance
Search this Blog
Deleted Photos in Facebook and FS? - Are you sure?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
thanks for the info reyane...
ReplyDelete