Comment by throwaway2016a
7 years ago
This (and the GDPR - even though my company is in the US) are why I now tell the developers on my team to not collect info unless they have a definitive use case as to why to store it. And make sure to delete delete data as soon as it is no longer needed.
It helps that my business doesn't monetize via advertising.
My guess is what actually happened here is that they had a use case to store it for a few hours or so (incase, say the user changed their mind about posting it) and no one ever bothered to write a cleanup script because "storage is cheap" and possibly "maybe we might have a use case for it someday"
I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up.
Edit: Wow. Who new applying Hanlon's razor to this would get me downvoted so badly? I'm going to leave this here unedited and eat the downvotes of the people on an anti-facebook warpath because I think it is important to state that we as people who make tech products often take short cuts (like avoiding dev work because it is cheaper to just keep data in storage) and we need to stop doing that. There is plenty of stuff Facebook does that is beyond the pale but this one is more likely contributed to lazyness, and if you are going to downvote me without explaining why you are not contributing to the conversation.
Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My apologies, dang. I did not realize and/or forgot that was against the guidelines. Will not happen again.
Thanks!
> I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up.
Nope. They wrote a routine that makes the video invisible to the actual user but refrained from deleting it right away. That is intentional.
> That is intentional.
It's funny you are so sure of this.
And you essentially just called me wrong without providing a use case. My statement was I couldn't think of a use case for them to do this intentionally and your statement does nothing to disprove that.
Hiding a video can and probably is just an "UPDATE videos SET visible=0 WHERE id=123" And it is extremely common to soft delete things for hard delete later in case the user made a mistake or law enforcement requests it or any number of reasons.
Especially in large distributed systems where things often need to happen asynchronously.
Not permanently deleting a soft delete file is not necessary intentional. Anyone who has ever worked on a large software project knows about backlog stories (say, hypothetically, "free up space from soft deleted videos") not being done for years because other priorities keep pre-empting them.
Similar reason when writing in a garbage collected programming language the memory isn't freed immediately.
Does that mean it was unintentional? Not necessarily but it certainly is plausible that it was unintentional.
Okay, so if it wasn't intentional how else could old videos still be in the system. Videos is not a new feature and the videos date back as far as 2008.
Facebook may be a bad player, but they have tons of talent working for them. Are you seriously suggesting that they stored a decade worth of videos that never saw a single view/download and nobody there realized it?
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