I've explained this to my some of my friends before and they are always shocked. Programmers seem to be the only ones who know 'delete' doesn't really mean it is gone forever. Even if Facebook really did a hard-delete on the data, there could still be screenshots, temp files, and caches out in the wild.<p>I'm glad non-programmers don't realize this though, because then the internet would be really boring and half of these sites wouldn't exist. Having stuff from my past pop up 5, 10, 20 years later could really suck.