If you have ever uploaded a picture on a social media network like Facebook or photo sharing services like Twitpic and Flickr then wanted to delete them, this might be a big trouble for you.
I figured out today that deleting a picture from Facebook makes it disappear from their website (the link doesn’t of the picture show up anymore) but not really from their servers, and a small research on the web shows that this is not new, it has been showed that pictures deleted from Facebook, MySpace etc are not always deleted right away, and actually their Facebook picture is still online after more than a year now without disappearing from the Facebook servers.
For testing purposes I tried deleting pictures from Facebook, Picasa and Twitpic, only Twitpic has deleted the photo after few minutes, the other two are still here.
This means that some time in the future we might be able to search for persons by their (deleted) pictures on such website, while services like these are already working pretty well like idée TinyEye which indexes pictures using their links, it won’t be strange for facebook to start new privacy settings that allow such services to index even the so called deleted pictures.
The moral of the hole story is, if you are to upload any picture on the web, make sure to use services that gives you control even over your physical pictures or at least provide temporary links that expires after some period of time like Flickr and Twitpic.
