Why does a deleted post still show on the Internet? Why are my posts publicly seen?

PrayerRequest.com is a publicly accessible web site. Prayer requests are available for anyone to see.

We purposely state this, and you give us permission to do this and to use this content in exchange for using our web site, in our Site Terms of Services (see below for excerpt).

This is also why when you come to the site you can see other prayer requests.

If the site were private would you see other people's requests?

Therefore there should be no express or implied expectation that any posts on the site are private.

After your post is deleted at our site, it may still show up on other sites like Google. This is because it may take them weeks or months to update their sites. They cache their results and only update them every so often.

You will have to wait for these other companies to refresh their results. We do not run or control these other companies. We only control what appears on our site.

This is stated - which you agree to when using the site - in our Terms of Service where we specifically state:

Terms, Rules, and Privacy | PrayerRequest.com

Please do not post the last name of anyone - yourself or others. Any materials which you post here may remain here indefinitely and be seen by anyone in the world forever including public search engines, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. You will not require us to delete any of your account information or remove any of your posts.

You acknowledge that any post made by you on the Site is public, without restriction. If you don’t want your posts permanently made public, do not use the Site. The Internet is public. It is also permanent. Once a post has been online, it is generally preserved in the cache of search engines. It will also be available via simple search for as long as any search engine exists. Using or posting to the Site is a service with value even if there is no upfront monetary charge to you for it. In exchange for the value of using or posting to the Site, you grant the owners of the Site a permanent, irrevocable license to use any materials you post to the Site ("User Content") including permission to use the materials in search engines, social media sites, email and similar outlets used in connection with the Site. By posting User Content on the Site, you warrant and represent that you own the rights in and to the User Content or are otherwise authorized to post, distribute, display, perform, transmit, or otherwise distribute User Content.

Privacy Policy

All your posts may be retained by us indefinitely and publicly viewable on this site, search engines, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other places on the Internet forever. Private messages are not publicly viewable or included in search engines. They can be viewed by the site administrator.