Add new comment

This is the seventh post in a series debunking some common misunderstandings about online privacy. The images used in these posts have been adapted from a tutorial given by Gerald Friedland at ACM Multimedia in Nara, Japan in October. Read previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.

Once a tweet has been retweeted or a post on Facebook has been liked or shared, you can't delete it - neither technically nor legally. Once a web page has been crawled and indexed by search engines, there is a record of it. If you post something that shouldn't be made public, you don't have much time to delete before it's really not possible. Posting information therefore means giving up control over it.