In 2009, Ars Technica discovered that an alarmingly high number of
deleted Facebook photos were never actually deleted. Now, more than a year later, it appears that the social network
has yet to fix the problem.
When Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng first contacted Facebook representatives about the issue, they told her that any deleted photos were inaccessible to other users, even if they still exist on the site's server. As Cheng points out, however, this isn't entirely true, since a direct image link will still provide access to a deleted photo, like this pic that Cheng originally 'deleted' on May 21st, 2009. At the time, Facebook reassured Cheng that it was working with its content delivery network (CDN) partner to "significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist." As of yesterday though, neither Facebook nor its CDN had yet to delete the image. (We are presently unable to confirm this, as we couldn't get the image to load this morning.)
Salam