Not only is social networking not private, for the most part you are ceding some, or all, of the rights to material you post to social networking websites. Once your material is on their servers, you’ve essentially given it away. Something to think about.
From the link:
A study conducted by the University of Cambridge discovered that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not immediately remove from its servers photos that have been deleted by users. The study audited 16 different social networking sites by uploading photos, noting their URLs, and then deleting them. Thirty days later researchers checked the URLs, and in the case of 7 sites, the photos had not been removed from content delivery networks.
The 7 sites are: Bebo, Facebook, hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, SkyRock, and Xanga.
Other sites were able to remove pictures immediately, and surprisingly, frequent security offender Microsoft was one of them: Windows Live Spaces had immediate removal of photos. Also on the ball were Orkut, Photobucket, and Flickr.
Interesting post. I think it is noteworthy to add information about Google Cache as well. Turns out Google actually caches a snapshot image of every website it crawls, and it is possible for people to view content for several months (depending on the indexing frequency of the particular site), even after a page is completely modified, or even removed altogether. Be careful what you post and where.
Erick
http://www.erickfellows.com
Comment by Erick — May 26, 2009 @ 4:01 pm