Thursday, August 19, 2010

What happens when you delete things off of the internet?

For example--say you have a Facebook page and you deactivate or delete your account; you have a Livejournal or Xanga account, MySpace, Yahoo!, etc... what happens when you delete that account?





What happens to your information and your pictures? Where does that stuff go? Does it just disappear as if it never existed? Or is it stuck in limbo? Is it still accessable to others in search of it?

What happens when you delete things off of the internet?
It isn't deleted.


On file systems delete only removes the connection between the data bytes and the reference to it.


It's like scratching out London on a map, London's still there.


In Unix it's actually called 'unlink' which is much more accurate.


The data remains until overwritten. Even then it's still recoverable. Norton. "Govenment Wipe" overwrites data 8 times, which probably does delete it.





If anyone wants to be my girlfriend we could have lots of discussions about similar interesting subjects.)
Reply:Data recovery people "re-link" the file by finding the many start and end positions of the data on the memory map... I'm sorry, I'm boring myself now. Report It

Reply:Anything you post to the internet can be deleted. But, it is likely copies of it were made (by google.com or archive.org, etc.) before it met deletion.





Your information is probably on someone's computer.
Reply:I dunno how much you know about computeres but, infomation is stored magnetically as binary infomation (1s and 0s) when you delete something the magentic charge is removed.





Everything on the internet is stored on a computer somewhere in the world (though it may not be how you picture a computer, with a screen and keyboard, it may just be a large hardrive connected to the internet) So when you delete it, the magnetic charge is removed, so it no longer exists.





Hope this isnt to complex.
Reply:I would say it's lost in limbo, it out there somewhere, but the average person wouldn't be able to find it.
Reply:The server deletes it.





(it's gone for ever on most sites)


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