Abigail Keller: Iowa Police Officer Quits over MySpace Photos

Abigail Keller, a reserve police officer in Altoona, IA, has been forced to resign over compromising photos posted to her MySpace account. Due to the circumstances of her resignation , Abigail Keller was ruled eligible for unemployment benefits, as she had taken the photos down from MySpace before joining the police department.

The photos were brought to the Altoona police department's attention by a local businessman, though it's unclear why he thought it necessary to do so. Police officers have private lives, and teachers don't live at the school, but the larger lesson here is that if you work with the public, keep the party pics off the Internet.

When you delete a photo from a social networking site, that photo is still cached somewhere in the cloud. There isn't some little stack of servers somewhere called MySpace: we're talking about hundreds of server arrays across the world, each with replicated content to serve it to users based on proximity. That means that, when you delete that pic of you with that bong, your photo is not yet purged from the social networking site's servers, and may remain for weeks or months or however long until the next re-cache. In other words, just because you take the photos down, doesn't mean that they're really taken down.

The best course of action is not to post pictures of yourself that could get you busted at work.