Wolens wouldn't elaborate on what those factors are, but he did emphasize once again that people casually surfing Facebook would stop seeing the photo immediately upon deletion. "However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly, based on a number of factors." "As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a 'max-age' of 30 days for our CDN links," Wolens told Ars this week. Wolens confirmed to Ars that this was a result of Facebook's new photo deletion policy and storage systems. I tested this with two photos while saving their direct URLs, and both photos became inaccessible within two days of deletion. Since February, all of the direct photo links that were sent to me by Ars readers disappeared, and I began deleting my own photos again from Facebook's site to see how long it would take for them to be removed from the CDN. "We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted." Gone in 60 172,800 seconds "The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars in February. It took more than a year after our coverage began for Facebook to delete my photos from its CDN, but it seemed like only my photos were deleted-numerous Ars readers wrote in with links to their own photos that they tried to delete, and nearly all of those remained online (in direct-linkable form) for three years or more.Īll along, Facebook had maintained that users having direct URLs to deleted photos was rare (I have piles of Ars reader mail to the contrary), and that the photos were only available online for a "limited amount of time." But in February of this year, the company finally admitted that its systems may not have been working correctly in the past, confirming that not all photos were deleted within a reasonable amount of time after all. MySpace got around to deleting the photos from its CDN several months later, but Facebook ended up being the embarrassing holdout. Though it took mere seconds for Twitter and Flickr to remove the photos from their content delivery networks (CDNs) after deletion from the site, MySpace and Facebook weren't so quick. Our method for checking for the photos was to save a direct link to the JPEG in question-easily obtainable by even the most computer illiterate by right-clicking on a photo and telling your browser to open it in a new tab/window, then copying the URL. We first began investigating Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter in 2009 to see how fast our drunken-escapades-slash-cat-photos disappeared from the Internet after we deleted them from each of the social networks. As the company moves forward into its new role as a public entity, those issues will have to be addressed if Facebook wants to remain on top. There are plenty of other issues that Facebook users have run into in recent years. The company told Ars that its new photo storage systems are in place and are now deleting photos within a reasonable period of time, which we were able to independently confirm.īut this doesn't mean Facebook's privacy problems are gone. It has been more than three years since Ars first started covering Facebook's inability to remove "deleted" photos from its servers, but this particular saga appears to be coming to an end.
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