We prove a quantitative version of a result of Furstenberg [20] and Deligne [14] stating that the diagonal of a multivariate algebraic power series with coefficients in a field of positive characteristic is algebraic. As a consequence, we obtain that for every prime $p$ the reduction modulo $p$ of the diagonal of a multivariate algebraic power series $f$ with integer coefficients is an algebraic power series of degree at most $p^A$ and height at most $A{p}^A$, where $A$ is an effective constant that only depends on...