Facebook says sorry for KEEPING private videos you thought you had DELETED
FACEBOOK has apologised to its users after it emerged that private videos which were never uploaded to the site were stored online.
Facebook has endured a bruising 2018 so far.
The social network giant have faced a backlash from users as the data Mark Zuckerberg’s firm stores has been brought into the limelight.
This came into focus after a whistleblower claimed Cambridge Analytica used personal data taken without authorisation from Facebook users in 2014.
This information was then used to profile individual US voters and target them with political advertisements.
Cambridge Analytica had allegedly obtained data gathered through an app called thisisyourdigitallife.
Hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to academic use of the data.
But the app also allegedly collected their Facebook friends’ data, creating an unprecedented cache of private information.
UK Digital and Culture Secretary Matt Hancock told the Commons the allegations were “very worrying”.
While Zuckerberg will not be testifying about the allegations in Britain, he will go before a committee in the US later this month.
And the data that Facebook stores has once again been brought into the limelight after it emerged videos users did not upload were stored online.
Last week New York’s Select All revealed that Facebook had been keeping seemingly deleted old videos.
These videos, which were recorded but never published, continued to exist in the drafts.
Several users discovered these videos were still stored in their personal Facebook archives when they downloaded the data.
The social networking giant has now come out to apologise and blame the issue on a “bug”.
Zuckerberg: This was a breach of trust, I'm sorry this happened
They said: “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.”
Facebook stores almost every single action users have had with the social network since they’ve joined it.
Everything from the adverts you’ve clicked on, the events you’ve been invited to and the friends you have deleted is stored by Mark Zuckerberg’s firm.
The data is, in essence, the history of your time with Facebook.
If you want to download all the data Facebook has stored on you, here’s how to access that information:
• Go to Facebook.com/settings
• Then tap "Download a copy of your Facebook data"
• Next, select "Download Archive"
• The next step may take a few minutes, but once your Facebook archive is ready you will be alerted
• When it is ready, click "Download Archive" again and then a zip file will downloaded to your computer
• You can then browse through that archive by opening each file inside the folder