If you post some images on the internet and it gets shared around, will stay on the internet forever
or is that just an old wives tale or another way of saying you can remove from the internet but it’s really really hard to do it because someone will still have it somewhere.
I have uploaded and shared images that maybe one day I’ll want it removed but now not sure if it’s even possible lol
I tried to find some stuff I posted on a website many years ago concerning a NASCAR racing sim. I can find nothing about it.
Moved from Great Debates to IMHO. Please start paying more attention to where you start your threads. This is happening too often with you.
It’s
A couple of boring pictures of the Sacre Coeur from your holiday that you put on your own website are probably gone. A nude photo you accidentally posted on twitter instead of texting to your spouse, which went viral as a meme, is never going to disappear completely.
It depends on who you shared it with, and what they did, and whether they will respond to your request to take it down.
If you upload something to Facebook, you can delete it yourself later, but you may have only hidden it from public view. I found this out recently when I exported my Facebook account (in preparation to delete it), and the export contained old direct messages that I know for a fact I deleted many years ago.
Other sites won’t delete stuff even if you ask… I think SDMB posts stay forever and ever, and the policy is no deletions unless they violate policy or law. But people aren’t going to host these servers or keep this content backed up forever, so eventually it will become neglected and disappear.
If there’s no legal retention policy in place, then it really depends on how long the host feels like keeping it. Most services will eventually go out of business, maybe the data doesn’t get sold to another company, and your uploads will last until they decide they don’t need their old backups anymore.
The statement is more useful as a cautionary adage than a law of nature. Information staying online is dependent on people’s interest in it. I ran a website for almost two decades. Now it’s gone, the URL has been stolen by an SEO squatter, and the only traces of it exist on my own personal backups and the Internet Archive. If the Internet Archive goes away and my hard drive dies, would there be any hope of finding any trace of my website again? Probably not.
Now that’s a site that had at most a few hundred regular readers, what about a site like Something Awful (or even The Straight Dope) that fostered a huge community with a great deal of images and writing? I, in fact, have a few images saved from old Photoshop Contests on Something Awful. Could I go find that post on the site now, many years later? Perhaps. Perhaps I could also find the original thread that hosted the contest. But if Something Awful closes down and doesn’t bother leaving up an archive, what hope is there? Maybe some other folks saved copies like I did. A few things from SA like Groverhaus may pass into myth and persist forever, but things on the internet seem much more ephemeral than they used to.
Now what happens if someday Twitter closes down, or Facebook, and all that information goes with it? Suddenly things that seemed like they’d be around forever become much harder to find. So I think the truth is what goes on the internet is hard for one person to remove, but time will wear it away just as well as it wears everything else away.
Exactly. Act as if everything on the Internet stays there forever. It’s very clear to me that everything doesn’t survive – I’ve lost plenty of stuff that no Wayback Machine or Google cache has archived. Is it possible someone somewhere out there has it? I suppose, but I have no evidence for it. But anything I write or post anywhere, I just assume is permanent and can be traced back to me, even if I really don’t think it can. Keeps me from doing stupid shit.
Oh dear…
Thank you and agreed.
I’m aware that the hosting website or platform can take it down but who’s to know if any number of the hundreds of people in that place have a copy of it themselves and continue to share elsewhere. So while it may be deleted or removed from the hosting platform, it’s not technically gone since others may have it and still be sharing it elsewhere without my knowledge. This is what makes me think of the adage “What goes on the internet stays there forever”.
But I agree, ultimately nothing lasts forever. If there is no interest I’m sure the file or photo will just disappear completely but as long as there is interest in it, within that community of people, I suppose it’s always going to be around one way or another unless every single person with interest in that community is wiped off the planet simultaneously along with their files lol.
I agree with @Mr.E that it’s more of a warning, than an absolute statement.
For example, if you go post a picture on some site, it may well fade off that site in a relatively short period of time, because the site goes out of business, your post goes into the “archives” where nobody looks, or something like that.
But there may well be some person somewhere who saved it, and decides at some unspecified future time to post it on some other site.
That’s why it’s in the nature of a warning- once it’s “out there”, you have no control over what happens to that image/data/whatever, and when it pops up again. It could well be that your picture would never see the light of day again, it could be that it becomes a staple photo of whatever it is. Or it could go dormant for a decade, then pop back up when someone posts it on a whim or whatever. You can run around killing all the instances of it being posted at a point in time, but you still have no way of knowing whether you got them all, AND you don’t know whether someone has it squirreled away on a thumb drive somewhere, to repost in 2034.
It’s not that it automatically lasts forever; it’s that you have absolutely no control over what happens to the content you post. Best practice is to assume that every single thing you post will end up mirrored, disseminated, and stored in one manner or another.
The first message board I ever signed up for was something called Stunner’s Wrestling News. I posted fantasy cards in which I, in my naivete, did things like have Hulk Hogan do suicide dives and Glacier win the World Heavyweight Championship.
Mercifully, it seems there’s no trace of it left on the internet.
If someone makes a copy of what you uploaded / posted / published, then even if you later delete or edit it, if a copy was made then it could persist ‘forever’. Even Facebook, if you post something kind of wild and someone snaps an image capture of it, they could then have that image up elsewhere even if you delete the original post.
This.
As a grad student in the '90s, I discovered the Usenet newsgroups and posted a fair bit to a fetish-related group using my graduate student email account (my real name actually got included too). I was kind of relying on obscurity to protect my anonymity at the time. It turns out I still am: Google bought the Usenet archive back in 2001, and even now - almost 30 years later - I can still search and find all my old posts with my name on them.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Thescrr odd posts
back in the AOL chat room days, there was a girl who played a character based on a set of well-risque Boris Vallejo-type drawings in the unofficial user rooms
Well one Christmas she decided to take some pics of her as that character …and send them to a few of us
well, she was only 17 so we weren’t supposed to keep the pics… But what happened was a couple of her friends didn’t delete the pics and one of them used a file sharing system like Napster but this one was for almost anything … and apparently, it scanned the person’s HD for every scrap of media it could find and since the pics file name was the character name, all you had to do was type in the name and you could do the pics…
How it was discovered was her friend had almost 1k people downloading the pics and it almost crashed the PC Als o someone on a fan site gave out who and how to get the pics from
she had to talk to some authorities about it and promise to wait until she was of age to take any more … last time I heard about it was a few years ago when she was informed they were still being passed around by teen porn traders almost 30 years after the fact
Ditto all the above. I had a bunch of family stuff on Geocities 30 years back, and now, if not for the Internet Archive, it would be totally gone. And even with the Archive, it’s not easy to find.