Facebook finally wipes the traces of your deleted photos from internet

After years of controversy, now Facebook finally removes the “deleted” images stored in their servers. When you delete an image from your Facebook profile, it actually not get deleted, the image  only get de-linked from your Facebook profile. Even after deleting the image , one can access the same through the direct URL. You can check yourself. Open an image of your Facebook Album, Right click on that and copy the image location (in FireFox browser). Delete that image from your Facebook profile. Now copy the image URL to the browser address bar, you can still access that.

Facebook uses Content Distribution Network (CDN) for storing images, images, videos and other files. Actual problem was with this CDNs which keep the images even after the removal from Facebook profiles. The process of clearing such images from Facebook CDN cache was taking even more than three years. Means your deleted images Facebook were actually getting deleted only after three years (that was also not guaranteed).

Now they have brought down this period to one month, and in some cases the images may get deleted within two days. Facebook has confirmed by the spokes man of Facebook Frederic Wolens, to the website Ars Technica. The images with direct Facebook URL (Relatively new images) will be deleted immediately by the user action itself. The cached copy of images stored in Facebook CDN servers will be cleared within 30 days.

To test this today (19 Aug 12) I’ve deleted one image from my Facebook album. That image is still accessible through this URL. Let’s see how long it will take to get it deleted completely. (Update: Today 22 Aug 12, the image god deleted )