Social networking sites keep ‘deleted’ photos

The security research group from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge have recently announced the results of their latest study on the deletion of personal photos from the social networking sites such as Facebook. Cambridge academics claim that user photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after 30 days or more since people have deleted them.

A Facebook spokesman claims that when a user deletes his or her photos from their profile, all those photos are removed from the company’s servers “immediately”. However, the Cambridge University team found quite the opposite. The research group performed an experiment during which they uploaded photos to a several social networking sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces. The academics then deleted those pictures from their online profiles, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks. When the researchers checked the URLs 30 days later, most of the links to photos continued to work even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed. As BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones puts it: “you may have put your pictures in Facebook’s bin, but you will still have to wait for the content delivery network to delete them”. Furthermore, special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, did better than Facebook and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

It is not the first time that Facebook has breached user privacy as recently users of Facebook staged a revolt over rules which would have given the site permanent ownership of their data.

Joseph Bonneau, a lead researcher of this project, concludes that “social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct and it’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on”.