Facebook Keeps Info For Ever

PALO ALTO – It’s not a secret anymore that Facebook tracks just about every bit of information belonging to its users that it can get its hands on.

It’s what has made Facebook so successful with vendors and advertisers.

What may be lessor known and downright shocking is that Facebook never gets rid off the stuff they collect, even when users ask to have certain information removed from their account or delete their entire account all together.

The latest Facebook scandal to rise to the surface is the hording of users’ photos.

Facebook claims that it removes all images from its servers after a request has made by users to do so within a few months.

On the contrary, it now seems that several years later those same pictures are still on Facebook’s servers, neatly stored and accessible to Facebook programmers.

“It’s worse than that,” says Ars Technica. The company claims the images are still accessible to anyone who has a direct URL to the photos.

Ars Technica has been investigating Facebook photo technology for several years. In 2009 the company alerted Facebook about keeping ‘old’ users information.

Facebook then responded saying it was hard at work figuring out a method to get rid off old backups faster.

One year after this incident Ars Technica contacted Facebook again addressing the issue of a few ‘removed’ photos. Facebook responded by simply deleting those specific photos permanently without making any comments to the request.

On Monday, Facebook has officially responded to Ars Technica 2010 request and said it will remove all ‘user deleted’ photos from its servers within a few months; the same sentiment they shared 2 years ago but never complied with.

The social site blames the hording of images on a ‘bug’ in its system. However, according to Facebook the system will be upgraded in a few months from now, making that ‘bug’ obsolete.

With the new system in place, Facebook says it will only take ’45 days’ for photos to be removed from its servers.

Facebook has been in the spotlight a lot for allegedly violating users privacy rights and holding on to users data for its own interest.

Up until now however, the social site continues to flourish with some 800 million members using the site, where they post anything under the sun.

Authorities have thus far never investigated Facebook for alleged privacy rights violations, despite the numerous claims.

READ:
 Facebook Continues To Track Users
 Zuckerberg Gets Taste of Own Recipe

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