Facebook swears it'll delete the unpublished videos it saved

Recent Facebook controversy prompted many users to download their data from the social network, and some of them discovered an unexpected surprise: the data contains videos the users created but never saved. It seems the videos were recorded using Facebook's older tools, but then discarded rather than published. The users had believed the videos were gone for good, making their presence within the data download file an uncomfortable discovery.

Facebook didn't have much info about the discovery at the time, saying that it would look into why the videos were in the downloaded data. Now it has a response, blaming the unpublished content on a bug that caused the drafts to be saved. The company provided the details through a spokesperson to NY Magazine, explaining that the bug caused deleted drafts to be saved.

The company didn't go into details about the nature of this bug or why it would cause the video drafts to become permanent fixtures within the user's account data cache. However, Facebook swears it is deleting the videos now and that it "apologizes for the inconvenience." You can check whether Facebook saved any of your video drafts using the platform's "Download Your Information" tool.

Facebook's complete statement reads:

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.

Many Facebook and former-Facebook users have been calling for a mass exodus from the platform following the Cambridge Analytica leak and details about the extent to which Facebook's platform left user information exposed to developers. Some users have since expressed discomfort with the level of information they found within their downloaded account data, including detailed call and message records collected from Android users.

SOURCE: NY Magazine