Facebook to bin deleted user images

USERS of Facebook can finally breath a sigh of relief when they delete a photo from their profile.

The social media giant is at last changing its system so that when a user removes a photo it is permanently deleted and not stored on the company’s server.

For years Facebook has been holding on to deleted images of its users – often of an embarrassing or even incriminating nature.

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Now it will permanently erase pictures within a 14-day “delete command” with a maximum delay of 30 days between removal from someone’s profile and from the server as a whole.

The change was announced three years after Cambridge PhD student Joseph Bonneau found pictures he thought he deleted.

The 28-year-old notified Facebook after he found that he could still access the removed images a month after he had deleted them.

He said: “The lesson hopefully to other companies is to build in privacy right from the start, because if you don’t get it right first time it can be a huge effort to fix.”

Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens said: “As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure we have instituted a ‘max-age’ of 30 days for our content distribution network link.”

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