According to researchers from Cambridge University, users can STILL find photographs they have ‘deleted’ from many social media websites, over a month after the user deletes them!
Social media picture puzzle
The researchers opened accounts with 16 social media sites and uploaded pictures. Then, 30 days later, they returned to see if the image URLs still contained the images. They found that 6 sites, including FaceBook, still had the images accessible.
FaceBook keeping users out of the picture
FaceBook claims to delete images ‘instantly’ from its servers. The problem seems to be that images still remain on FaceBook’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), AFTER they have been deleted from their servers.
The images then remain on the CDN until they are eventually overwritten.
FaceBook says that this overwriting usually happens “after a short time.” This seems at odds with the Cambridge Researchers experience, where images were still there 30 days later.
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That is alarming news to me, and completely unethical of facebook
So why weren’t the names of the other 5 social networking site in this article ?
Scruft,
That’s a good question.
At the time of writing the post, none of the news release sites I use listed any of the others that failed.
The story is now on the BBC website and they don’t list the other social media sites either – which is odd – as they are the biggest news gathering agency on the planet.