[ontheotherhand]

It's not possible to delete those documents because they didn't have mechanisms in place to delete them back then? It's not possible to physically delete documents that have been flagged as deleted and emptied from trash?

How about "no"?

[s_henry_paulson]

There's no evidence that the document wasn't deleted.

It's not the document that's being accessed, but an embedded image within the document, accessed by some unique identifier.

It's entirely possible they just have this jpg saved with it's identifier, but don't have good information about the related documents that pointed to it, hence not knowing that it should be deleted.

I mean think about it, google docs STARTED in 2007 and was based entirely on products built by companies they acquired.

I am 100% positive they didn't have everything set up properly in 2007.

[ontheotherhand]

Then simply look through all non-deleted documents and see which files are still referenced and which ones are orphans. Delete the orphans. Done.

[magicalist]

If the "working as intended" behavior is that these images won't be deleted since they can be linked to from elsewhere on the web, as appears to be the case (see my link to the old blog post above), they actually can't delete these old images.

[ontheotherhand]

"they actually can't delete these old images."

They can, it just would break those old links. A dumb decision ages ago doesn't force you to stick to it as you seem to imply.