FACEBOOK RETAINS PICTURES UP TO 16 MONTHS AFTER DELETION

Ever find a really embarrassing picture of yourself on Facebook?  Did you click the delete link and think "wow, I'm glad that's gone"?  Well, it may not really be gone.  It can take up to 16 months for that embarrassing picture to be deleted from Facebook's servers.  Facebook explains "For all practical purposes, the photo no longer exists, and we wouldn't be able find it if we were asked or even compelled to do so," Facebook spokesperson Simon Axten told Ars via e-mail this week. "This is similar to what happens when you delete information from the hard drive of your computer."

Except, your computer hard drive isn't indexed by Google,Yahoo and many other search engines (at least not yet anyway), cached in browser histories and scraped and archived by hackers.  Facebook needs to make "delete" actually mean "delete" and make it instant, not almost a year and a half later. [Gizmodo]