|bd| Facebook as Invincible Pron Host?

Posted by bendodge on Sept. 27, 2011, 7:45 a.m.

So, after reading the slow but steady trickle of articles about facebook photos living forever on the CDN after being removed from the main site's database, I got to thinking - what's to stop people from uploading something to facebook, say an embarrassing photo of some politician, and then promptly deleting it, but saving the direct URL? He'd then have an image near impossible to take down or DDoS.

I've been getting more and more wary of facebook lately. I manually cleaned out my message/chat logs, been trying to find scripted solutions for deleting all my old wall posts and comments on other people's stuff. Do I really need anything more than a year old on there? Or even a month?

Theoretically, someone could upload child porn to the CDN and force facebook to do something about it (or have an invincible file host if they continued to ignore it). I'm not about to try it, for obvious reasons, but I'd bet a nickel I'm not the first person to think of this.

Comments

Moikle 12 years, 7 months ago

well if he released the url, they should be able to remove it.

oh, wait, no O_o

bendodge 12 years, 7 months ago

Exactly. It's almost bizarre.

sirxemic 12 years, 7 months ago

They technically should be able to remove it, though.

Also, that article is 11 months old. Maaaaaybe they did something about it and are deleted pictures actually deleted furrealz. Don't count on it, though.

bendodge 12 years, 7 months ago

Check the links in the article. It does appear that facebook manually removed the original one, but other old photos persist (3 years).

JuurianChi 12 years, 7 months ago

Holy Crap.

So my personal Photos are still there?!!?

Cesque 12 years, 7 months ago

Facebook doesn't freak me out nearly as much as Google, AKA "Let's make a copy of every webpage in existence, ever". Among other things, this is how whole Encyclopedia Dramatica was resurrected instead of staying put, and a basis of a few controversies I don't recall anymore.

What also freaks me out are old (pre-Google) websites that just won't die and may have something by you submitted to them (AKA published personally by the website's owner) even though the webmaster is long dead and so is his e-mail account.

bendodge 12 years, 7 months ago

That's fine as long as everyone excludes the government. Google "Federal reserve monitoring blogs."

Google doesn't concern me as much because they left the door to the trap open. I can download all my data, I can delete my whole account, I can delete data from a certain product, etc. Facebook has started implementing some similar options, but they left out a really important one - the ability to delete large chunks of data easily. Instead, I can either delete each item individually or everything at once. Google will let me clean stuff out semi-efficiently.

Regardless, I know I'm hypocritical in using Google whole-hog and complaining about facebook. But I still have a little confidence left in Google's stance. It's not excellent, but it's a lot better than facebook's.

Cesque 12 years, 7 months ago

Quote:
In the words of Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."

Hey, I remember when I was naive enough to believe that was a solid justification of anything.

Quote:
Google doesn't concern me as much because they left the door to the trap open. I can download all my data, I can delete my whole account, I can delete data from a certain product, etc.

Yeah, but I wasn't talking about Google's email/social network/whatever, I was talking about their policy of preserving webpages, or versions of webpages, people have deleted or changed for whatever reasons.

bendodge 12 years, 7 months ago

The Google web cache actually cleans out fairly quickly in my own experience. Did I miss something? And making a copy of every web page is sorta necessary for search…

MMOnologueguy 12 years, 7 months ago

Facebook is now Wikileaks for photographs.