It's not a totally insane belief to have. Facebook infamously held onto a "deleted" picture belonging to an Ars Technica writer for well over three years. [1]

It's not a totally insane belief to have. Facebook infamously held onto a "deleted" picture belonging to an Ars Technica writer for well over three years. [1] Hanlon's Razor would just dismiss that as "CDN's are hard", but it doesn't explain why the one picture owned by the author that they emailed Facebook about finally went away, but others they had the URLs for did not. Whether it be malice or stupidity, I think the sane default belief is that "delete" doesn't actually remove the bits in most cases, and that goes double for PII brokers like Facebook and Google. Act accordingly. [1]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/nearly-3-years-later-deleted-facebook-photos-are-still-online/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/nearly-3-years-later...