Websites 'keep deleted photos'

The research at Cambridge University showed that the photographs that have been deleted by members of social-networking sites can still be found online. Researchers put photos on 16 social-networking websites. They saved a copy of the web address where the images were stored, and afterward deleted the images. However, when the team checked back 30 days later they were able to find photos on seven websites using the same web addresses, despite having manually deleted the images. Facebook was among those seven sites where photos were still viewable, although it convinced that photos are removed from its servers "immediately". Together with Facebook there were such social-networking sites as MySpace, hi5, and Bebo who failed to delete photos. The Cambridge report also criticized blogging sites such as LiveJournal, Xanga, and SkyRock for not removing images. Flickr and Picasa did a better job at deleting photos while Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly. Joseph Bonneau, a PhD student involved in the study, criticized guilty social-networking sites for their lazy approach to safeguarding privacy. "It's imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on," said Bonneau.