[evincarofautumn]

Based on what I saw when I worked at FB, deletion means “it is really deleted from Facebook’s servers”. It just takes time for that to propagate across all data centers, get out of all caches, that sort of thing. Naturally, nobody believes this even though it’s true, just like nobody believes that Facebook doesn’t sell user data, even though their very business is based on keeping that data to themselves so they can profit from it through ad targeting.

Some minimal tombstone metadata like “This ID was a post/image” is kept around for things like error messages (“The post you are trying to view is not available. It may have been deleted or you may not have permission to view it.”). There might be exceptions for illegal things (like child pornography) where there’s some obligation to keep the data (or a hash or something) for law enforcement purposes, but I’m not aware of any.

[herbst]

Everyone who used their ad system should be fully aware that actually selling data would only hurt their business model.