Social networks store your deleted data

Yesterday, the BBC published the results of an experiment at the University of Cambridge, it turned out that popular social networks store photos on the server after they are deleted by the user.
The experiment was carried out in the following non-sophisticated way, photos were uploaded to 16 social networking sites, and direct links to them were saved, after they were deleted, the links continued to display images on 7 sites, including Facebook.

“This confirms that social networks often take a“ lazy approach ”to user privacy, preferring to act as simpler than as right,” commented Joseph Bonneau, one of the authors of the experiment, “But privacy protection should be“ stitched ” in the service, and not act as some kind of voluntary appendage. "
In "Contact" photos are also not immediately deleted, this can be easily verified in a similar way.

As for the Facebook network, they commented on the fact that photos from their servers are deleted immediately “True, the file URLs continue to respond for some time in the provider's content network until they are fixed. Usually this happens rather quickly ”, a representative of Facebook explained, but now it’s all the same for users of this social network, as new rules have recently come into force in which users agree to transfer their company data to perpetual use, this has caused a number of protests from users of this network.

With a high degree of probability, some resources can store all user changes made by them, so I would advise being more careful with this in a world where information rules everything :).