We have a saying in Portugal that I’m not sure exists in other languages, but basically and literally says “where there is smoke, there is fire!”. We all heard about all the “Conspiracy Theories” around Facebook, that include CIA, NASA, NSA, ICANHAS [1] and what not… I was never into any of those and I still hold to the opinion that if any of those agencies want your information… they’ll get it, and they don’t really need Facebook. We also all heard how some really interesting and even revolutionary findings have been done by accident… So this is one of those accidental findings!

As I’m checking and cleaning some old bookmarks, I come across one I named “conversation10″… I vaguely remember bookmarking a Facebook conversation a while back for reasons I don’t even remember, but I have since then, deleted that whole thread/conversation from my Facebook messages. To my surprise, when I opened the bookmark, it opened the following screen on Facebook:

(click to open full sized image on Flickr)

Clicking the link, I get that whole conversation with current profile pictures and all. This has only one explanation: Facebook doesn’t really delete anything. Now think of your embarrassing photos that you thought you’ve deleted… They’re still hosted somewhere!!

After finding this, I searched the web to check if this was a known “feature”. Every page I found was of someone asking how they could recover they’re deleted messages, and the answers all said “no”. To be real honest, you can’t really recover them unless you saved the thread ID from the URL. But if you still have that conversation in your browser’s history, you can easily get that and just add “&show_del=1″ to the end of your URL, or even just open the old thread page and click the link like from my screenshot above.

Ok, this is definitely not a revolutionary finding. Nor it’s an extremely useful one. But it just adds up to all the “Facebook Conspiracy Theories” out there [2]… Especially if you check Facebook’s Help:

I accidentally deleted a message. Can I get it back?

There is no way to recover messages that have been deleted. Sorry.

Are they just being “mean” or don’t they want the “world” to know about it? In other news, I’m still using Facebook, and will keep using! If I put something online, I’m perfectly aware I might be “cached” somewhere and be unable to completely remove it from the interwebs… But that’s me…

[1] Yes, I was just making those up… All I heard about was CIA, but don’t they look cool like that?? And you gotta admit the LOLcat in there was really well put, right?

[2] Anyone got links for posts and videos on those existing theories? They’d be a ncie addition to this post…