Facebook Apologizes for Keeping Videos You Never Posted Remember all those videos you decided against posting and deleted instead? Facebook kept them.
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This story originally appeared on PCMag
If it wasn't clear before the Cambridge Analytica debacle, it's very clear now: Facebook stores a lot of information about each and every user. But what you may not have realized is, the social network even keeps a copy of all the videos you decided against posting and deleted instead.
Last week, Select All reported that Facebook data archives included references to videos users had recorded, but then decided not to post publicly and instead deleted. It turns out while you may have deleted those videos, Facebook didn't.
Why is Facebook saving non-public and deleted videos? It turns out the social network didn't know the reason when asked and it took them a week to figure out why it was happening. In response to Select All's request for clarification, Facebook explained that this was due to a bug: "We discovered a bug that prevented draft videos from being deleted. We are deleting them and apologize for the inconvenience."
On the one hand it's reassuring that Facebook wasn't saving the draft videos on purpose. However, the social network has over 2.2 billion users. Can you imagine how many draft videos get created every day, and until this week they were all being saved on Facebook's servers. How can such a huge amount of data go unnoticed for years?
This close scrutiny of Facebook is surely set to continue as the social network attempts to regain trust with its users and governments around the world. In the meantime, you can opt to delete your account, or as a less drastic measure why not protect your data while still using the social network by installing Firefox's Facebook Container add-on.
