Thought your deleted social media posts were safe from prying eyes? Think again.
A TIkToker is explaining to a new round of people exactly how easy it is to recover parts of your digital footprint even when you thought you’d cleared it away—a stark reminder that once something is on the internet, it may never go away.
“This is why you gotta be careful posting stuff on the internet because whatever you delete can be found…and I found it,” user @srhoe says in a short tutorial video posted this week.
The TikToker went on to introduce people to the Wayback Machine, a website dedicated to archiving snapshots of URLs as they’ve appeared over various dates in time. Now, the Wayback Machine isn’t new—it’s existed since 1996 (available to the public since 2001) and has been archiving publicly available websites all that time.
It is incredibly useful for retrieving information that would otherwise have been lost as websites go down, but as @srhoe points out, it also makes it very difficult for people to have any control over the accessibility of what they’ve previously posted online.
Specifically, he shows that putting in a Twitter user’s URL with “status” at the end, using his own (“http://twitter.com/5rhoe/status/”) as an example, can pull up a bunch of prior tweets—including ones that may have been deleted in the past.
“This feels so illegal to know,” he says.
One important thing to note about the Wayback Machine is that it doesn’t archive everything. It has a list of publicly available websites it crawls regularly to save pages and relies on individual users to specifically archive certain pages. Additionally, it can’t save posts from locked pages—so if your Instagram or Twitter is private, those pages won’t be archived, unless they were previously public.
Several people commenting on @srhoe’s video were already familiar with the Wayback Machine but expressed concern that others posting things online may not have known about it.
@srhoe #fyp #minitutorials #cybersec #creepy #website ♬ original sound – srhoe
“Ppl just now finding out about the way back machine is the scariest thing,” wrote one viewer.
“Nothing is truly deleted,” another added. “Once its on the internet, its stored & saved somewhere in some elite database forever.”
A further viewer simply wrote, “I’m cooked.”
The Wayback Machine is hardly the only way social media posts can stick around after you’ve deleted them. Other sites mirror videos and photos uploaded to various social sites, not to mention folks who take screenshots and either circulate them or save them for a later date. No matter who you are, or how many followers you have, something can easily end up someplace you have no control over once you hit post. And it’s always safer to assume that it will than to hope it won’t.
The Daily Dot has reached out to @srhoe via TikTok comment.