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Social networking sites not fully deleting photos

Online security researchers have placed a spotlight on social networking sites after revealing that some of those embarrassing photos that users may have deleted can still be found on the websites.

The researchers from the University of Cambridge posted photographs on 16 social networking websites including Facebook, which has 40 billion photos and receives up to 25 million new ones every day.

After noting the URL of each of the photos, the images were then deleted but attempts to retrieve them a month later were fruitful in seven of the sites, the researchers stated.

Some of the blogging and social networking sites studied included Bebo, Blogger, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picassa, Xanga and Windows Live Spaces, which was the only one whose photo servers required session cookies.

Speaking to the BBC a Facebook spokesman said "URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten.

"Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time."

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