21 May 2009
Facebook is lazy with your pictures
Olivier Laurent

Researchers at Cambridge University have found that seven social networking websites failed to delete photos from their servers even when a user asked for them to be removed, the BBC writes.
The team put photos on 16 different websites, noted the direct links where the images were stored, deleted them, and finally came back 30 days later to see what had happened. On seven of the sites, using the direct links, the Cambridge University researchers found that the images had, in fact, not been deleted. Facebook is one of these sites (MySpace, hi5, Bebo, LiveJournal, Xanga, and SkyRock also failed the test).
However, Flickr, Photobucket, and Fotki removed photos within one hour, and Blogger, Picasa and Orkut within 48 hours. The biggest surprise is Windows' Live Spaces, which removed photos instantly.
Photographers, you have been warned.
Blog roll
- 5b4
- 1000 Words Photography
- A Photo Editor
- A Visual Society
- BagNews
- BagNews (on Tumblr)
- Boston Globe's The Big Picture
- Conscientious
- Conscientious Redux (on Tumblr)
- Duckrabbit
- Foto8
- Food For Your Eyes
- Gawker
- Getty Images' Blog
- Here
- Hotshoe
- Institute for Artist Management
- Invisible Ph t grapher Asia
- Journalism.co.uk
- Lens at The New York Times
- Lens Culture
- Lightstalkers
- Los Angeles Times Photography
- Mastering Multimedia
- Mostly True
- No Caption Needed
- PDN Pulse
- Photo Magazine (France)
- Photojournalismlinks
- Prison Photography
- Prison Photography (on Tumblr)
- Resolve - The liveBooks Photo Blog
- Romenesko
- Rob Galbraith DPI
- Saatchi Online
- StockPhotoTalk
- Telephoto
- The 37th Frame
- The Big Picture
- The Daily Nice
- The Click
- The Online Photographer
- The Russian Photos Blog
- The Travel Photographer
- Vice Magazine
- Wall Street Journal's Photo Blog
- WarShooter
- What's the jackanory?

















