Did you ever record a video on Facebook to post directly to your friend’s wall, only to discard the take and film a new version? You may have thought those embarrassing draft versions were deleted, but Facebook kept a copy. The company is blaming it on a “bug” and swears that it’s going to delete those discarded videos now. They pinkie promise this time.
Last week, New York’s Select All broke the story that social network was keeping the seemingly deleted old videos. The continued existence of the draft videos was discovered when several users downloaded their personal Facebook archives—and found numerous videos they never published. Today, Select All got a statement from Facebook blaming the whole thing on a “bug.” From Facebook via New York:
We investigated a report that some people were seeing their old draft videos when they accessed their information from our Download Your Information tool. We discovered a bug that prevented draft videos from being deleted. We are deleting them and apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate New York Magazine for bringing the issue to our attention.
It was revealed last month that the data-harvesting firm (and apparent bribery consultants) Cambridge Analytica had acquired the information of about 50 million Facebook users and abused that data to help President Trump get elected. Specifically, the company was exploiting the anger of voters through highly-targeted advertising. And in the wake of the ensuing scandal, people have been learning all kinds of crazy things about Facebook.
Facebook users have been downloading some of the data that the social media behemoth keeps on them and it’s not pretty. For example, Facebook has kept detailed call logs from users with Android phones. The company says that Android users had to opt-in for the feature, but that’s a bullshit cop-out when you take a look at what the screen for “opting in” actually looks like.
Source: Facebook Blames a ‘Bug’ for Not Deleting Your Seemingly Deleted Videos
Robin Edgar
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