PC World is pointing to an interesting study that has found that some popular social sites are not really deleting your photos when you think they are. When the average user deletes a photo they have posted on Facebook for example, they assume that photo is gone.
This is not always the case however. The University of Cambridge has discovered that at least seven popular sites might still have those photos live for as many as thirty days. These seven sites are:
– MySpace
– Bebo
– hi5
– LiveJournal
– SkyRock
– Xanga
Meanwhile, sites like Windows Live Spaces, Orkut, Photobucket, and Flickr were able to remove photos almost immediately.
In actuality, the offending sites have removed the images from their servers. It’s just that the images still resided on content delivery networks, which store them. BBC News quotes a Facebook spokesperson on the matter:
“When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately. However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time.”
Those trying to manage their online reputations are going to have to consider that their efforts might not be enough in some cases. If nothing else, this should be a lesson to think about what photos you are posting of yourself to begin with.
