“Deleted” Facebook photos still not deleted: a followup
Facebook may be making strides in some areas of privacy, but the company is still struggling when it comes to deleting user photos—or not deleting them, as the case may be. — We wrote a piece more than a year ago examining whether photos …
Context & Ripple Effects
When websites were first caught keeping deleted photos in May 2009, Facebook was among the services whose 'removed' images stayed reachable by direct URL. This followup finds the same failure persisting more than sixteen months on, despite the interval being filled with privacy-forward announcements — the Groups relaunch earlier this month and August's Places rollout among them.
The awkwardness is sharpened by Facebook's own July 2010 photos overhaul, which invested heavily in higher-resolution uploads and better presentation while the deletion pipeline apparently went unfixed. Users were getting a richer photo product built on top of a store they were told they had emptied.
First-order effects
- Users who clicked delete have no effective control: photos marked removed remain fetchable by anyone holding the direct URL, meaning the delete button's promise is broken at the storage layer, not the interface layer.
- Facebook's privacy messaging — Groups, Places, granular sharing — now has a concrete counterexample attached to it, since the same company shipping new controls cannot execute its oldest, bluntest one.
Second-order effects
- Every rival network pitching privacy as differentiation gains a talking point at no cost: 'deletion that actually deletes' becomes a competitive claim precisely because the market leader failed at it publicly for over a year.
- Press-driven verification of delete functions is likely to spread beyond photos — if Ars Technica can re-test URLs sixteen months later, other outlets will apply the same audit to messages, accounts, and other networks' content.
Third-order effects
- Deletion is being forced to evolve from a legal-policy statement into a verifiable engineering guarantee, with journalists and users treating persistence bugs as accountability failures rather than technical footnotes.
- If the pattern holds, platforms face structural pressure to build provenance-aware storage where removal propagates to CDNs and caches automatically — making 'right to deletion' an infrastructure requirement ahead of any regulator demanding it.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are entering an era where claimed data deletion must be independently verifiable, as persistent-content failures erode the trust that social products run on.