Facebook has admitted it secretly deleted private messages from people’s inboxes sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The company said messages disappearing from people’s inboxes was first noted by TechCrunch, who cited three sources whose inboxes had been tampered with.
This indicates that Facebook and Mr Zuckerberg has had access to people’s private inbox messages for years.
Facebook blames bug for saving users’ deleted videos https://t.co/dSXwcPFObh by @riptari pic.twitter.com/m48s3Qo6rx
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) April 3, 2018
It calls into question the level of privacy of using Facebook.
In a statement, Facebook said it did so in compliance with its legal obligations to preserve messages when limited the retention period for the CEO’s messages in Messenger.
The feature has been used to prevent potentially embarrassing messages from resurfacing.
One such message was sent in 2004 by Mr Zuckerberg that reportedly called users of the social network “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data.
Facebook also said the messages were automatically deleted and the reason the feature was added was to prevent hacks like the one that happened to Sony employees.
Facebook altogether keeps everything that happens on the user’s page, from flirts to rants, pictures shared, locations and even phone calls made from your mobile phones.
With this piece of news, it is clear Facebook is still running into trouble regarding privacy.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, many people deleting their Facebook accounts realized that Messenger has been collecting call/SMS metadata for years.
Now the company is once again under fire, this time for allowing executives to delete Facebook messages when normal users never had that option.
Last week it was revealed that Facebook was caught archiving videos users thought they had deleted.
The New York Magazine flagged the problem to the company last week, after a user downloaded their Facebook archive only to discover with surprise multiple takes of a video they had thought had been discarded at the time the recording was made, years earlier.
Facebook has now apologized for failing to delete the videos, saying “a bug” prevented draft videos from being deleted. It adds that it’s in the process of deleting the content now.