Facebook Blame Bug For Saving Users’ Deleted Videos

Facebook has been caught archiving videos users thought they had deleted. The New York Magazine flagged the problem to the company last week, after a user downloaded their Facebook archive and was surprised to discover multiple takes of a video they had thought had been discarded at the time the recording was made, years earlier.

Facebook has now apologized for failing to delete the videos, saying “a bug” prevented draft videos from being deleted. It adds that it’s in the process of deleting the content now.

A company spokesperson told TechCrunch: “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.”

It has also confirmed the deleted content was never publicly shared, although it’s less clear whether Facebook’s systems used the outtakes in any other way — such as as another signal for its ad targeting systems, for example.

The social network’s business model is based on building detailed profiles of users so they can be segmented into custom audiences for advertisers to pay to reach.

The undeleted videos were recorded via an old feature that allowed Facebook users to make and post videos directly from their web browser.

This system functioned by streaming the videos to Facebook as they were being recorded-hence, without a working delete function being in place, it was possible for reams of outtakes to be unintentionally archived on Facebook’s servers.




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