Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Blames a 'Bug' For Not Deleting Your Seemingly Deleted Videos (gizmodo.com)
Last week, The New York Magazine found that Facebook was archiving videos users thought were deleted. The social media company is now apologizing for failing to delete the videos, blaming it on a "bug." It adds that it's in the process of deleting the content now. Gizmodo reports: Last week, New York's Select All broke the story that social network was keeping the seemingly deleted old videos. The continued existence of the draft videos was discovered when several users downloaded their personal Facebook archives -- and found numerous videos they never published. Today, Select All got a statement from Facebook blaming the whole thing on a "bug." From Facebook via New York: "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."
which is a great language for prototyping or programming if you know what you're doing and you're the only dev on the project, but junior devs or even senior ones that don't know the code they're working with, it's a disaster.
For example, I was able to prototype a search feature with an Elasticsearch backend for our inventory system in only a long weekend. By long weekend I mean working from Friday night at 6pm straight through Monday early morning 2am, but still it was only one weekend. It took three senior Java developers nearly six months to get it basically working because we wanted it in Java. My boss got frustrated and put my PHP code into production and had those Java devs update it. With every "fix" they made, I think they almost always broke other things. They knew the specs well since they had worked with them for almost six months, but that didn't help. PHP is awesome, but unless you only have one dev that is good working on the project, then things like happened to Facebook are inevitable.
More likely the real bug was in letting the users download these videos a part of their archives, instead of paying attention to the "deleted" flag.
-- Alastair
Removed from the 'Personal Archive'.
The bug was it failed to set the hidden flag on draft videos, like it does all the other things facebook isn't supposed to be saving. Or ever have had, if you were fool enough to run their app.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The continued existence of the draft videos was discovered when several users downloaded their personal Facebook archives -- and found numerous videos they never published.
The actual bug is that Facebook mistakenly told users of the archived deletions. Reporting of these archived deletions will now correctly be withheld from the personal Facebook archive report. That is all.
I'm shocked, shocked to find user data not being deleted when requested.
Here is your deleted user data sir.