Found very odd pictures with Recuva...

[Whammy]

Alright so today I decided to run Recuva (a file recovery tool) on my old 1Tb HDD, which I've been using for about 3 years now. I recovered everything I could to see if I had anything interesting which I had previously parted ways with. The results were... surprising. Through the hundreds of thousands of pictures recovered, among old family photos, thousands of game textures and icons, Youtube thumbnails, etc... I also found hundreds of images from Facebook friends, people whom I've never visited their profiles. I'm talking about a full quality download of every image in their Facebook albums, but it just seems to be for a few random people, some of which as I've already said, I have never even been on their profile, they just happened to friend me and I knew them.

So this got me thinking, why is it that I have these images? Is it cache from Facebook or the way Chrome caches its data? And if so, why do I have full quality images for every single one? I really don't know what could be the reason and Google isn't very helpful...

 

[Newt Pussable]

If I recall correctly Facebook had a thing going on a few years ago where people could download all info and pictures from their respective facebook (including things from all friends and groups they tied to. I think its about 3 years ago ( sometime in 2012). This might be the reason you have the files now.
It`s a long time ago so I`m maybe not completely right. But its something among those lines. I did it myself by mistake without noticing before a long time. I don`t think facebook offer this feature anymore.
Hope it helps somehow.