(For embarrassment's sake, here are my two photos that were deleted from Facebook and MySpace depending on when you read this article, these photos may or may not still be up).īoth sites claim to delete user info immediately, so we reached out to the companies to see what they had to say about the findings. As of this writing, both images we used are still available on Facebook and MySpace servers despite having been "deleted" in May. Advertisementįacebook and MySpace, however, did not fare so well. Direct links to the photos in question broke after a quick hard refresh, so you can be sure that your salacious pictures mistakenly posted to Flickr while inebriated will no longer be accessible to your enemies (assuming they didn't copy them to their hard drives, that is). Both Twitter and Flickr deleted our photos within seconds. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.įirst, the good news. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear-or you may not, depending on the social network. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual-after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers. In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean.