Is Facebook recording your unpublished data

According to a petition created by the name of ‘Care2’ boasts more than 27,000 “signatures” from people who want Facebook to “stop stalking our unposted thoughts!” The group is referring to posts, comments and status updates that people type out, then delete before they ever share.It is believed that the social media giant is saving unpublished data by its users to its servers.

Although, Facebook’s data scientist and former company intern prepared a report according to which the website was tracking how often do users type out posts, status updates or comments, and then delete the text before publishing? The results were astonishing, 3.9 million Facebook users over a 17-day period, and found that 71% of users “self-censored” at least once.

Facebook made it very clear that they do not collect or track any content that people have chosen not to post. It seems that the study was misinterpreted by some people. The sole motive of the research was to find out when people typed and then deleted, not what people typed and then deleted. According to the people involved in the research, “To mitigate noise in our data, content was tracked only if at least five characters were entered into the composer or content box. Content was then marked as ‘censored’ if it was not shared within the subsequent ten minutes using this threshold allowed us to record only the presence or absence of text entered, not the keystrokes or content.”

The company says that they stored no data, only binary values as per the observations were recorded for further use. McTernan, the man behind Care 2 says that he is concerned with Facebook gathering metadata around user’s unpublished thoughts, even if they aren’t collecting the actual content. According to him Facebook’s decision of carrying out a research on such an issue is a matter of concern.

Now whom should we believe is the question. A man for whom Facebook has been practicing breach of privacy or the social media company that has maintained its position at the apex for years together. Share with us your views in the comments section below.

via SocialAppsHQ Blog http://www.socialappshq.com/blog/2014/01/06/is-facebook-recording-your-unpublished-data/