Facebook users find videos that they never uploaded in archive

Facebook is in trouble again after users reported instances where they discovered videos that they had never posted on the website.

Facebook has been in the middle of an ongoing controversy since the London Observer and The New York Times reported that analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had illegally mined 50 million Facebook users’ data to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

The controversy resulted in users of the social media platform increasingly using the archive feature, which allows users to download every bit of content ever uploaded by a user on the website.

In one such instance, when a New York magazine reporter’s sister downloaded her archive from the website, she found multiple videos of her playing a flute recorded years ago. The user had recorded several videos in order to post the best one on a friend’s wall. According to the user, she had recorded more than a dozen videos before she uploaded one.

Users can record videos, preview them and upload or discard them using the Facebook’s Camera feature.

The user only ever uploaded one video and had discarded the rest. But when she downloaded her archive, she found not only the video she had uploaded but also the ones she had deleted. Apparently, Facebook saved all the videos without the user’s knowledge.

"We've heard that when accessing their information from our Download Your Information tool, some people are seeing their old videos that do not appear on their profile or Activity Log," a representative from Facebook said, when contacted by CNET. "We are investigating," he added.

The recent controversy has affected the social media giant quite harshly and the company lost more than USD 50 billion in market cap in a couple of trading sessions. Although the company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised in public, a large number of angry users refused to accept the apology and joined the #DeleteFacebook campaign.

To make matters worse, several well-known personalities such as WhatsApp Co-Founder Brian Acton came out slamming Facebook for its policies. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, took it a step further when he deleted his company’s official Facebook account. Musk was joined by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who also deleted Apple's official Facebook account.