Social networks caught keeping deleted photos

In May 2009, University of Cambridge computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau discovered as part of his research that many social network respond to user requests to delete photographs by hiding them while remaining them on their servers. Among the worst offenders were Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and LiveJournal. A Facebook spokesman explained that while photographs were immediately deleted from the company's own servers, the data would take longer to be removed from Akamai, the Content Delivery Network the company uses to distribute data across the internet. Even so, other sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, and Google's Orkut also used Akamai but were able to revoke images immediately.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/may/21/socialnetworking-facebook

Joseph Bonneau.
Writer: Bobbie Johnson
Publication: Guardian