Most everyone has seen or heard of social networking sites affecting privacy in crazy ways. They’ve cost people jobs, ended countless relationships, and in the best cases, resulted in some bruised pride. As more people get hit, more users are choosing to remove questionable content from their pages, but the content’s not necessarily gone.
Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng put recent findings from Cambridge University researchers to the test with some unsavory results. Turns out your deleted pictures may not be as far gone as you’d like.
Jacqui tested Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr with the same method. She deleted pictures from each site on May 21st and then watched the direct links for six weeks. Twitter and Flickr were both good, truly deleting the pictures after a hard refresh. MySpace and Facebook didn’t fare so well. Direct links from both sites still produce the “deleted” images, some six weeks after they were pulled.
Moral of the story? Continue to censor your drunken impulses, particularly with regard to the pictures you upload.
Apple and AT&T took more than two months to sell the first million iPhones. The iPhone 3GS matched those numbers in just three days, making it the biggest sales weekend for AT&T, ever. AT&T celebrated the milestone with…a company wide memo. Yay?
Koji Suzuki likes to scare people. The famed Japanese author has written bloodcurdling tales like “The Ring,” which have been adapted into films in Japan and Hollywood. Suzuki has a new idea for scaring people, one which involves the time you spend on the toilet.
