If my gardener leaves a rake on my driveway, I'll remove the rake. That doesn't make the gardener an employee.

I’m not sure how that follows. Are you suggesting they don’t keep backups or use a “deletion” flag temporarily, e.g. as part of spam account removal?

Indeed. I deleted my Twitter account recently, there was a message that data is retained for 30 days to facilitate un-deletion. I assume their internal process is the same.