Don't believe this. Gigabytes of "content" are generated on Facebook every minute, right? So this is either a waste of time or a lot creepier than it seems at first glance. I'm not one of the many privacy hawks here at hubski and I've never typed anything into Facebook and then deleted it for nefarious reasons, so my main concern is that this is a bizarre and pointless outlay of resources.Facebook isn’t keeping a database on all these non-posts’ contents, mind you — it’s simply keeping a record of all the data surrounding self-censored posts such as what time it was almost posted and whether it was set to be posted on a friend’s page or on the user’s own page. Kramer and Das say that Facebook wants to understand all the reasons that people decide against posting because the company “loses value from the lack of content generation” every time a would-be post gets the axe.
Definitely on the creepy side, storage and data processing is so cheap that Facebook could think up a use for it in the future. Although to be honest, the amount of data they gather has reached such absurd levels I don't know how much more they could know about us.
Why, though? What need can they have to know where we daily almost post things? I can't imagine a site change or an ad campaign or a new feature that could use that information. Maybe I just don't use Facebook's various thingies enough to know.