The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

When we first investigated this phenomenon in 2009, we discovered that photos "deleted" from Facebook seemingly never go away if you have a direct link to the image file on Facebook's servers.

Users who might have had second thoughts about posting a photo -- whether it was because they didn't want retaliation from an employer, wanted to avoid family drama, or uploaded a photo of a friend without their permission—could certainly remove the image from Facebook's main user interface, but as long as someone had a direct link to the .jpg file in question, the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time. When we asked Facebook about it, we were told that the company was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist.

"But when we followed up on the story more than a year later, our "deleted" photos were still accessible via direct link. That's when the reader stories started pouring in: we were told horror stories about online harassment using photos that were allegedly deleted years ago, and users who were asked to take down photos of friends that they had put online.

There were plenty of stories in between as well, and panicked Facebook users continue to e-mail me, asking if we have heard of any new way to ensure that their deleted photos are, well, deleted. For example, one reader linked me to a photo that a friend of his had posted of his toddler crawling naked on the lawn.

He asked his friend to take it down for obvious reasons, and so the friend did -- in May of 2008. As of this writing in 2012, I have personally confirmed that the photo is still online, as are several others that readers linked me to that were deleted at various points in 2009 and 2010.(Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece.

The company never offered me any explanation, but my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time. Other "deleted" photos that I had saved links to -- ones that weren't from my account and were deleted even earlier than mine—remained online.)

Source: Cnn.com