An anonymous Facebook employee has revealed that all user activity on the site is recorded and stored with as many as six copies of each photo retained.

In an interview on the therumpus.net, the employee answered a question about if everything is saved, whether or not it has been deleted or untagged. He said that was essentially correct, and it was only changing that for performance reasons.

The employee said: “How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press ‘A’, or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organised alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your ‘best friends’, or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.”

The employee admitted that the change was made ‘sometime in the last three months’, but it stores snapshots, which is basically a picture of all the data on all of the Facebook servers. The employee said that this is done every hour, of every day of every week of every month.

When asked if this is every viewable screen, the employee said: “It is way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen. So when we store your photos, we have six versions of your photos. We don’t store the original: we make six different versions on the photo uploader and upload those six versions.”

These are stored in four data centres around the world – in Santa Clara, San Francisco, New York and London. The employee said that in each of those, there are approximately five to eight thousand servers.

Read more at: SC Magazine UK

Facebook has come under heavy criticism over privacy settings after users were warned about changes to the controls on its homepage.

The message tells users of the social networking site ‘we’re making some changes to give you more control of your information and help you stay connected. We’ve simplified the Privacy page and added the ability to set privacy on everything you share, from status updates to photos.

“At the same time, we’re helping everyone find and connect with each other by keeping some information – like your name and profile picture – publicly available.” A guide is then offered to help the user control their privacy settings.

However criticism has been made on the language used in the guide, while users have hit out at the removal of the right to display profiles to certain friends. One user said: “I could previously customise my friends list visibility – not only as to make it not visible to non friends- but I could choose which one of my friends could not view it. With [these] new privacy settings I cannot, it’s either everyone can see it or no one. This way you have restricted my range of choice…everyone’s range of choice actually!”

Many other users hit out at the rights of everyone being able to see a user’s friends list, with many users commenting that they wanted the settings restored. One user said: “Seriously. You don’t just go and remove privacy from 350 million users. Seriously, Facebook. Who the hell do you think you are? If hackers made everyone’s profile pictures public there would be an uproar.”

Source: SC Magazine UK