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I'll look into what's happening, but in general it's expensive / complicated to delete from edge-caching CDNs.

If there is a photo that gets constant traffic, the edge caches will do their job of keeping it around. Poking around the Googles, it looks like this URL has been reposted a lot, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and will keep it around in cache.

http://www.google.com/search?q=5013_96426961157_709851157_21...

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So you can't delete delete a picture if other people, who don't own it, like to look at it?

Not very hard to imagine how that might be exploited in some undesirable ways.

It's more complicated than that and I'm talking and about edge caches in general here, not for my employer. I once saw a Flickr employee (Cal Henderson?) pluck the original Ludicorp logo out of Yahoo's edge caches. That's not to mention ISP caches and proxies, third party image search, etc, that neither you, I, Akamai, nor Facebook control. I'll look into it and see what's going on in this case.

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