If I Get a New Phone Will My Deleted Videos and Photos Be Uploaded.
Biz & IT —
Over three years later, "deleted" Facebook photos are withal online
Photos that you remember you're deleting from Facebook are even so remaining on …
Some photos just don't need to see the light of the next day.
Facebook is nonetheless working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly 3 years after Ars outset brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not ever delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing upwards a newer system that makes the procedure much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years agone remain accessible via direct link.
The problem: "deleted" photos never go away
When nosotros first investigated this miracle in 2009, nosotros discovered that photos "deleted" from Facebook seemingly never become away if you accept a directly link to the image file on Facebook'southward servers. Users who might have had 2d thoughts about posting a photograph—whether it was because they didn't want retaliation from an employer, wanted to avoid family drama, or uploaded a photo of a friend without their permission—could certainly remove the image from Facebook's master user interface, just as long as someone had a direct link to the .jpg file in question, the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time. When we asked Facebook most it, we were told that the company was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist."
Merely when we followed up on the story more than a yr later on, our "deleted" photos were still accessible via direct link. That'south when the reader stories started pouring in: we were told horror stories about online harassment using photos that were allegedly deleted years ago, and users who were asked to have down photos of friends that they had put online.
There were plenty of stories in betwixt as well, and panicked Facebook users continue to e-post me, request if we accept heard of any new way to ensure that their deleted photos are, well, deleted. For example, one reader linked me to a photo that a friend of his had posted of his toddler crawling naked on the lawn. He asked his friend to have information technology down for obvious reasons, and so the friend did—in May of 2008. Every bit of this writing in 2012, I take personally confirmed that the photo is all the same online, equally are several others that readers linked me to that were deleted at various points in 2009 and 2010.
(Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece. The company never offered me any explanation, simply my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time. Other "deleted" photos that I had saved links to—ones that weren't from my account and were deleted fifty-fifty earlier than mine—remained online.)
Information technology's 2012, and things aren't much different—yet
Later confirming once again that all the photos that my friends and Ars readers had sent in were still online, I reached out to Facebook once over again, looking for an respond as to why this is still going on nearly three years later on the visitor first promised it was "working" on the issue.
"The systems we used for photograph storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable menstruation of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars via email.
Wolens explained that photos remaining online are stuck in a legacy organisation that was plainly never operating properly, but said the visitor is working on a new system that will delete the photos in a mere calendar month and a half. For really existent this fourth dimension.
"Nosotros have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted within 45 days of the removal request being received," Wolens said. "This process is nearly consummate and in that location is only a very small per centum of user photos still on the erstwhile system awaiting migration, the URL you provided was stored on this legacy system. We expect this procedure to be completed inside the next month or two, at which point nosotros will verify the migration is complete and nosotros will disable all the sometime content."
Long story short, Wolens claims that Facebook is on the verge of fixing up its content systems so that "deleted" photos are really, truly deleted from the CDN within 45 days. But with the procedure not expected to be finished until a couple months from now—and unfortunately, with a visitor history of stretching the truth when asked about this topic—we'll have to see it before we believe it.
Information technology's hard to believe that nosotros've been following this story over a flow of years and the problem hasn't been fixed yet. Merely unlike the past, nosotros do have some semblance of confidence that Facebook might actually be working on it this time. We'll continue to follow this story until the new changes are actually in place. In the meantime, does anyone have any new Facebook horror stories to share?
Listing image by Photograph illustration past Aurich Lawson
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/02/nearly-3-years-later-deleted-facebook-photos-are-still-online/
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