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Comment by al_james | Hacker News Reader

And it will still probably be on google image search, and then the wayback machine. In short: You can't close the door after the horse has bolted: If any digital content gets published there is very little you can do to take it away.

That said, they must be wasting a huge amount of CDN storage on these old photos!

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When this issue came up last time, it seemed as if the only reason fbcdn images were ever hitting Google Image Search was that people had deliberately hotlinked to them from their own web pages. It is actually just as easy --- you could argue that for a non-tech-savvy user it's even easier --- to save and repost the photo itself.

I agree with your analysis though: once you post it, it's out there, and there's nothing you or Facebook can do about it.

Neither GIS nor Archive.org will index or archive photos you haven't set public. ("Friends Only" is not public.)

I think you will find thats the case unless someone hotlinks the image. Facebook permissions work at the level of the page showing the image, not on the image file itself.

> "Facebook permissions work at the level of the page showing the image, not on the image file itself."

Exactly. HN discussed this a couple weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740271

I'd written:

Facebook operates web servers generating authenticated and authorized web pages. These pages are dynamic, generated per user, based on current privacy settings. These privacy-managed pages contain links to assets considered, by users, to be just as private as the page.

When the user changes privacy settings for the page, the linked assets privacy could easily be kept in line, as demonstrated by CloudFront CDN being able to support private content links.

Facebook's fault is that the privacy managed page links to public (non-privacy managed) assets, using links that do not respect the containing page's privacy settings.

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