Behnam Dayanim, the lawyer who specializes in privacy and cybersecurity says that “Whether or not something is deleted isn’t within the user’s control”. We had apparently given the permission to companies to hold on to our data at the time of agreeing to their lengthy policies.
Here’s What Happens When You ‘Delete’ Something On The Internet
Well, if you think the content you put on social media is truly private, then you are wrong. What about those embarrassing tweets or Facebook posts that you might have posted a couple of years ago, you might have removed it from your social media accounts.
Well, Behnam Dayanim, the lawyer who specializes in privacy and cybersecurity says that “Whether or not something is deleted isn’t within the user’s control”. We can take the example of regular email when we delete it from the inbox, it goes to a “Deleted Items” folder.
Users need to permanently delete that message from their end by emptying that folder. However, Behnam Dayanim claimed that even a permanently deleted item could remain on your email provider’s server for an unspecified amount of time.
Behnam Dayanim also claimed that there are also high chances that your details including social media posts, emails, and text messages could wind up in the hands of hackers during the security breach.
Well, we can’t do anything regarding this, because we had apparently given the permission to these companies to hold on to our data at the time of agreeing to their lengthy privacy and policies. Here are what some of the popular services policies says:
Everyone uses Facebook, it’s the world’s largest social media website, and it saves your data for “as long as necessary to provide products and services to you and others.”. This just means that your deleted data still resides on Facebook’s server.
Gmail
Everyone uses the email service provided by Google. It also follows a similar policy to Facebook. Gmail says that they “may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers,” after you delete an email.
Twitter doesn’t have a clear answer to this question. However, Twitter says that “search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your user profile information and public Tweets, even after you have deleted the information from the Twitter Services or deactivated your account.”
Snapchat
Well, Snapchat keeps things simple they say that whenever you view a snap, it’s deleted from their servers in “Most cases”. Snapchat “can’t guarantee that the messages will be deleted within a specific timeframe” and says your snap “may remain in backup for a limited period of time.”
Instagram the popular photo-sharing site owned by Facebook says that it may hold information for a “commercially reasonable time for backup, archival, and/or audit purposes.”
Well, you might be freaked out by this! You can try Cyberdust app which lets you remove all the data quickly from almost all social networking sites. Users need to be careful while posting images, statuses, or any other files on social networking sites.
So, what do you think about this? Share your views in the comment box below.
