Flickr to Hold On to Deleted Photos for 90 Days

Due to an increase in public pressure, Yahoo's photo upload & sharing site, Flickr have implemented a system to allow members to restore previously deleted photos up to three months after. The Flickr blog today provided a list of the various policies in place to secure member photos and details. One of the points states "We’ve now instituted a 90 day delay in deleting the content, including the photos, metadata, comments, and all the bits of an account, after it’s deleted."

 This will be sweet music to the ears of Flickr users, whom you may recently remember the embarrassment Flickr went through when they accidentally deleted the wrong account. German man Mirco Wilhelm a member of the site with over 4,000 photos, reported another user for a violation of the terms of service. Flickr responded to the request and accidentally deleted Mr Wilhelm's account rather than the alleged abuser. Mirco was understandably outraged, with many of his images being linked all across the web and several days later Flickr managed to restore his account from backups. Flickr at the time declared that they were in the process of developing tools to modify their account deletion polities, preventing such hiccups from occurring in the future.

Previously Flickr has only kept data and photos
copies from the Pro accounts, but now they have
extended this to all accounts.

For privacy issues, any photo in the 90 day period will not be publicly available and after that time has elapsed all traces will be removed from the Flickr servers.