A devil's advocate could also say that they didn't have everything set up properly back then, and now that they have proper security in place, that it isn't possible to apply the new security to old documents because the options didn't exist at the time the documents were created.
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?
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.
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.
