Jacqui Cheng for Ars Technica following-up about how fast/well Facebook deletes its old photos:
It seems we haven’t quite found the limits of that “limited amount of time” just yet—after all, 16 months is quite a while.
So 16-months after Ars deleted some photos from Facebook you can still access them if you have the direct link to that image file (which is easy enough to get). This is just absurd – if you aren’t going to delete the photo then don’t tell the user that they can delete it, instead say something like ‘archive’.