Deleted Facebook pics stay online for Months

User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites including Facebook after people have deleted them, British researchers said Thursday.

The researchers posted photographs on 16 popular websites and noted the web addresses where the images were stored, before deleting them.

But researchers said that although the images appeared to have gone, they were still able to find them 30 days
later on seven sites, including Facebook, by using the web addresses.

The findings by a team from UK-based Cambridge University raise questions about the ability of users of the sites to permanently delete potentially embarrassing photographs.

Special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, fared better than Facebook and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly, the research found.

Joseph Bonneau, a member of the research team, said “When you delete a photo, many of the sites don’t actively remove it, they basically just wait for it to be overwritten. In theory, the photos could take months to disappear.”

“They have a responsibility to ensure users’ privacy, and they are not fulfilling that responsibility.” he added.

A spokesman for Facebook said that deleted photographs may continue to exist for a short time elsewhere.

“When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately, However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten” the spokesman told the BBC.