How Does Facebook Respond When You Delete Your Own Photos?

Sixteen social networking sites became a part of a study conducted by the University of Cambridge, regarding on how long it takes for users of the websites to permanently delete their photos.  The study audited the social networking sites by uploading photos, noting their photo URLs and then deleting them. After thirty days, the photos from 7 sites are still not yet deleted. So what are those 7 sites?

1. Bebo

2. Facebook

3. hi5

4. LiveJournal

5. MySpace

6. SkyRock

7. Xanga

And what are the other sites which were able to delete the photos immediately? 

1. Windows Live Spaces

2. Orkut

3. Photobucket

4. Flickr

So, what about user privacy? Facebook said that when a user deleted a photo on their site, it is removed from their servers immediately. The problem comes from content delivery networks and their slowness on wholly deleting photographic footprints. What? "Content delivery networks?" Those are used by big time sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a cached storage bid for elements such as photographs. Millions of photos are uploaded every day, so they really need those CDNs to function easily. 

The lesson? Never, ever upload photos that you think you may want delete in the near future. Be sure to upload photos which would not be against the reputation of anyone else, not just by yourself, but also think of what may occur to anyone's life if you ruined his/her pride with one single mistake by just uploading an unsafe, "undeleteble" photo!

ksm ((

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