If you thought you deleted those old, embarrassing Facebook photos, think again. Even when you scrub your photo albums of unwanted images, they still live on in Facebook's servers and can be accessed through the original direct links.

Ars Technica's Jacqui Chang has been pestering Facebook for an explanation for why user-deleted photos keep turning up like bad pennies for several years now. Chang originally questioned Facebook about the issue in 2009 but discovered recently that it's still an ongoing problem.

Facebook told Ars Technica that its older storage systems "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site." The social networking giant, which filed its IPO papers last week, told the tech site that it's building out a new storage network that will remove files deleted by users much faster.

Of course, back in 2009 when Ars Technica first investigated the story, they were also told by Facebook that it was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist."

In the meantime, Chang reports that photos deleted by Facebook users months and even years ago remain accessible, provided one has the original URL generated when a photo is uploaded to a Facebook profile.

Interestingly, Chang found that her own deleted photos from a few years ago had been scrubbed from the Internet at some point after she wrote a follow-up report on the story in 2010.

"Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece," she reports. "The company never offered me any explanation, but my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time. Other 'deleted' photos that I had saved links to—ones that weren't from my account and were deleted even earlier than mine—remained online."

For more, see PCMag's When Facebook Gets Creepy slideshow below.