Your Photos May Still Be Online….
In the Web 2.0 era the content sharing represents the driving principle of many of the existing sites over the Internet. You might have noticed the abundance of social networks, photo sharing websites, blogs and forums which allows the uploading and publishing of almost any type of content. But what is happening with your content when is deleted? Practically it must disappear, but in case of certain web sites or services, there are enough chances to still find your content online, even it was deleted.
A group of researches has performed a study regarding the photo sharing services or systems capability to revoke the submitted user information, showing that on a high percent of popular networks like Bebo, Facebook or LiveJournal, the user photos are still at their place after a deletion operation, being accessible through the same URL.
“My colleagues Jonathan Anderson, Andrew Lewis, Frank Stajano and I ran a small experiment on 16 social-networking, blogging, and photo-sharing web sites and found that most failed to remove image files from their photo servers after they were deleted from the main web site. It’s often feared that once data is uploaded into “the cloud,” it’s impossible to tell how many backup copies may exist and where, and this provides clear proof that content delivery networks are a major problem for data remanence.”
This phenomenon is explained based on the structure and functionality of server side mechanisms of photos management:”Most likely, the sites with revocation longer than a few hours aren’t actively revoking at all, but relying on the photos eventually falling out of the photo-server’s cache. This memory-management strategy makes sense technically, as photos are deleted from these types of sites too infrequently to justify the overhead and complexity of removing them from the content delivery network.”
In conclusion, you should carefully choose the photos which will be uploaded on a social network or photo sharing website, because according to the study shown in this article, the chances to find your photos over the Internet after a deletion operation are higher than you might think.
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