Above is me deleting a photo from my Picasa Google + photo account. See the asterisk?

“It may take 24 hours for this photo to be deleted”

And that’s Google; they have more servers than anyone. A smaller site might take longer. Plus, 24 hours in internet time is forEVER.

During that time, the photo could be crawled by bots, screen-capped, something like this could happen:

Years ago, my ‘Following on Twitter’ list backed up to my Blackberry, photos included. 

What if your profile pic is online for that brief moment, where someone somewhere, backs up?

Maybe you’re thinking: a 2 KB photo is too small to matter.

It is small, but it’s enough.

If you’re on Twitter in Toronto (and beyond), I bet you could identify everyone above, with that 2 KB.