A Feature, Not a Bug

Facebook is now saying that its saving deleted user videos was the unfortunate result of a bug.

I'm calling bullsh%$. Every time something like this happens, it ALWAYS results in more data collection.

It was policy:

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 us: “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.”

They had previously been caught storing unposted status updates, so I am fairly sure that only regret that they got caught.