It seems that every day we are finding more and more that what goes online, stays online, whether you delete it or not. An interested read on CNN today about digital images not going away after being deleted: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/21/study-photos-stay-online-after-you-delete-them/

Which intrigued me to look into how content management sites are handling deleted content.

Twitter

http://www.cio.com/article/print/493009

“However, by using Twitter’s Advanced search facility, all posts (whether they have been deleted or not) can be found, meaning that thousands of Twitter users can still get hold of Ross’s personal email address.”

Social networking sites in general

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/your_photos_stuck_in_the_cloud.html

Every site served the test image given knowledge of its URL except for Windows Lives Spaces, whose photo servers required session cookies (a refreshing congratulations to Microsoft for beating the competition in security). We ran our initial study for 30 days, and posted the results below. A dismal 5 of the 16 sites failed to revoke photos after 30 days:

Facebook

Here is a picture of my dog from facebook. All of my privacy settings are set to friends only,

I wonder if it is because the privacy setting is only for “Photos tagged of You” not “Photos you upload” (see my settings below).

Even better, is that on albums where the Privacy setting is set to “Only Friends” they provide a link for public access. If you go to the link you can see the images, even if you are not a friend.

The moral of the story is only upload pictures of your pets or other images you don’t mind the world seeing!