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Deleting your photos on social networking sites - are they really gone forever?

4 June 2009

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Social networking sites have exploded in popularity over the previous years. Hundreds of millions of people now have profiles on at least one of them and virtually every user posts photographs to their profiles. These photographs can then be seen by vast numbers of people all around the world in a very short space of time. Gone are the days when all you had to do to dispose of confidential material or photographs was shred them. In the digital age, one click of a mouse can do an infinite number of things, but deleting documents and photographs is not necessarily one of these. Taking pre-emptive action to protect your private photographs and information when using social networking sites will ultimately be more effective that having to react later when embarrassing photographs or information appear or, as has more worryingly been found out recently, reappears.

Facebook faced a users’ revolt recently when they attempted to amend their terms and conditions to give themselves greater ownership of users’ photographs and other personal information, even if users had deleted material or removed themselves from the site altogether. Due to the widespread concerns raised about privacy and data protection, those proposed changes were never implemented. Facebook instead kept their original terms and conditions and set up a “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” Group to ensure that users had their say in future. So just how private is any information you post on, and more importantly subsequently delete from, any of the increasingly popular social networking sites? What if embarrassing photographs you thought had been deleted suddenly reappear?

A recent Cambridge University study has found that photographs they posted then subsequently deleted from 16 popular social networking sites were still available on seven of them some 30 days later. Whilst the ‘deleted’ photographs no longer appeared on the user’s profile, they were available if you knew the direct web address to which that photograph was posted. Whilst it was difficult to find these photographs, it was not impossible. One of the things the study found was that social networking sites may not be taking sufficient action to protect their users’ privacy.

The CDN is periodically refreshed, so that any links to deleted material are permanently removed although ‘deleted’ material may still be available until the CDN has been refreshed. This two-stage procedure for deleting material is common amongst social networking sites. Many people will have breathed a sigh of relief when the Recycle Bin on their computer retained important documents or photographs they had accidentally deleted. They would not be feeling the same way if a photograph they thought had been deleted was later recovered and caused them to lose their job or their partner. Employers are increasingly using social networking sites to assess the suitability of current and prospective employees. There are many examples of people who have lost their job due to Facebook postings about their job being “boring”, or even making friends with inappropriate people. There are also numerous instances of marriages or relationships breaking up due to photographs found on social networking sites. Your clients, associates and prospective business relations can all easily check the social networking pages of people in your firm or company. They will also want to ensure that those they are instructing or doing business with are the type of people they want to be associated with. One embarrassing photograph or one which can be misinterpreted to cause offence could easily result in the loss of clients or deals.

Some social networking sites have been accused of taking a lazy approach towards users’ privacy and doing what is easier and cheaper rather than what is best for the privacy of their users. Protecting users’ privacy can be expensive, particularly as users do not pay to join social networking sites. If social networking sites did start to charge for their services, users would simply go elsewhere. They are, in some ways, victims of their own success. The mushrooming numbers of users simply cannot be supported by the advertising revenue that users bring in.

Social networking sites themselves may well need to re-evaluate the importance users place on their privacy and ensure that the technology they use can deliver the protection users demand. Users should also be taking steps to protect themselves.

The most effective way of preventing people from seeing embarrassing photographs of you is to not engage in embarrassing behaviour in the first place or ensure that such photographs are not posted on social networking sites. Users should also ensure that their, and their friends’, privacy and security settings are maximised, so as to limit the number of people with access to potentially embarrassing material. It is also increasingly important to ensure your children’s profiles do not contain any private or embarrassing photographs of you. Journalists regularly befriend people’s children or friends to obtain such photographs as teenagers are the primary users of social networking sites and are much more likely to post photographs on their profiles and accept strangers’ friend requests than their parents.

If you do find that private information you believed had been deleted subsequently reappears or that private information has been copied from your social networking page, you may be able to rely on various laws and legal tools to prevent its use and protect you. A brief summary of these laws and how they apply can be found below. What the study has proved is that prevention is still better than cure. Especially in the world of social networking and the ever-increasing speed at which information can be disseminated on the internet. Taking action now to stop photographs appearing on social networking sites or delete embarrassing photographs and private information is infinitely superior than having to react later when something you thought was private appears or something you thought had been deleted reappears.

3 Laws that help: