Can anyone answer this. I was told that anything anyone puts on the internet is kept forever- posts on bebo, forums, pictures emails etc. Is this true? Does anyone know about this topic? Is there a massive databse where evrything is stored or is this false?

In general false. Email is private, you can delete your bebo / facebook / myspace account, you can delete your photos from social networks which you have signed up, etc...

I wouldn't be too worried about it....if you have nothing to hide

If it's a concern of yours then you should check your privacy settings on any websites that you are a member off.

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Sites like archive.org and google's cache can store data for a long time.

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irish poker / irish jobs / seo faq / advertise jobs free / green card / skiing

Thanks for your help. Say for eg these posts. When they get so old they are replaced by other posts - so they are off the web for the public to see. But are they still accessible in the background by irishwebmasterforum? I know it sounds confusing!

Depending on who and what the system is ... there may / may not be a backup.

For example ... recently someone I know had applied for a job ... however the job disappeared from monster and they were unsure of the exact spec and had been called for an interview. A quick google on the job position and I found it ... got to the page saying it had been removed ... so I checked googles cache and there it was.

So its been "removed" by monster .. but it was still there in googles cache ... then as has been said there are systems like archive.org that even still have my old company website page which is quite cool every time I get nostalgic though I dissolved the company in 2003 I think.

So ... in a way the answer is yes / no

Really it depends on the specifics.

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Posts on a site like this will remain "forever"

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Ye but say boards like on IMDB or others where the maximum pages on topics say is about 50 pages -the oldest posts are on the last page and as more posts are made the oldest posts disappear. What happens to the old posts -are they gone or are they still kept by the website people.
And also information in msn chats- do MSN see the content of your chats?

It would depend on the software they're using, but most forum / board software doesn't delete posts. It might not display them to the public, but they're still there ...

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MSN track all chats. They have to to, so as to protect themselves from litigation in the US. If you read the Terms and Conditions of most web apps you'll find mention of data being retained.

Google have got into trouble by the EU about their data retention which is indefinitely, although people are anonymous after a time period. Even having data made anonymous can still lead to disaster, look at what happened with AOL's data leak - check out AOL Stalker for some shocking data.

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