After NYMag last week exposed Facebook’s surreptitious saving of draft videos that were never posted on the platform, the company has issued an apology, and blamed the whole debacle on a bug that prevented the draft videos from being deleted. The company, however, says that it has already started deleting all such videos on its system with immediate effect.
“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“
Ever since The New York Times and The Observer published the Christopher Wylie interview that revealed about the illegal data-mining activities of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has been hit by one privacy issue after another, including subsequent revelations about unauthorized collection of user data by Facebook Messenger and Facebook Lite on Android and the now-infamous leaked memo that critics argue reveals that the company puts profits above user-privacy.
Besieged by accusations of profiteering at the expense of its users, Facebook as been on a damage-control mode over the past couple of weeks, apologizing to its users for failing to protect their private data.
The company is currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK and the Korea Communications Commission in South Korea. The company is also facing multiple lawsuits over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with more expected to be filed in the coming weeks and months.
