Ever change your mind while composing a video to post on Facebook? If you used Facebook's tools, they kept it anyway.
Earlier this week, like many people around the world, my sister Bailey downloaded her Facebook data archives. Along with the contact lists and relationship statuses was something unexpected: several different videos of her attempting to play a scale on a wooden flute in her childhood bedroom. Each video, she discovered, was a different "take" — recorded on Facebook, but then, she assumed, discarded before she posted the final version to a friend's wall.
[...] Facebook's current data policy says that the company can "collect the content and other information you provide when you use our Services, including when you sign up for an account, create or share, and message or communicate with others." "Create" is the operative word in there. By that logic, Facebook technically could save any video a user filmed but did not publish because you created it on the platform.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:25PM
The videos shouldn't require downloading all of your data to know that they're still retained. If it isn't actually in a place where the user can find it without going through extra steps, it shouldn't be retained.
It should be perfectly reasonable for people to assume that if they can't see it from their account that FB hasn't had it. Especially in the case of unpublished drafts. It should be reasonable to assume that FB isn't retaining those as most operators don't, it's just too expensive to retain extra copies of videos that the end user doesn't like enough to publish.