Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — <i>&quot;I don&#x27;t want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you already provided&quot;</i>.<p>I got used to the looks of disbelief, thinking that I was some sort of hermit, an antisocial.<p>I also got tired of answering the frequent <i>&quot;Why don&#x27;t you have Facebook?&quot;</i> questions.<p>I remember the last time I had this conversation with someone, last year (2017) around August. I found a new love partner, and after the long intimate talks on the phone, they requested the usual <i>&quot;intimate pictures&quot;</i>, not necessarily sexual but certainly sexy. While I have no tabus with regards to my sexuality, having an understanding of how the Internet works, I have always refused to send that type of images&#x2F;videos&#x2F;audios, and I always tried to be patient with the other person to explain my constant denials. Unfortunately, expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet is most of the time based on hope, and even if they understand, they ultimately don&#x27;t care because the result doesn&#x27;t change: you don&#x27;t get to share something with them and that affects personal interactions.<p>I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as <i>&quot;deleted&quot;</i> and purge it only if they need the space. The same way a hard drive works, you don&#x27;t really delete a picture when you hit the &quot;delete&quot; key, nor even if you clear the &quot;trash&quot; folder, the data is still there, where it was, it just loses the links to the metadata.<p>It is sad how this information becomes news only when bad things happen.