Well, an orange calf at least.

Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this.

You might be right

They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!

lol

So are you saying that they suffered from a filesystem bug that caused deletion failure? I’d imagine they use standard filesystems on their backend, I haven’t heard about any bugs like this.

If you ask me, what’s more likely, that a company known for shitty behavior lies about deleting files so they can continue to use that information to profit, – OR – that they are experiencing a filesystem bug on their backend, I’ll choose the former.

But clearly the data is not overwritten and this was intentional. How do I know? Because that would amount to a massive amount of data, if it was de to a bug in Apple software or underlying filesystems, it would be detected in monitoring systems “Hey, we’re using 10x the data we should be, maybe we should look into it”.

The mistake was in the flag code that was supposed to fool us.

Nothing sinister, we just don’t delete what we say we delete. Instead we keep it in your profile to feed the algorithms and set the “deleted” flag to make you think it’s gone.