This seems to be anecdotally confirmed by multiple people here. To me, if true, this screams of a broken engineering culture inside Facebook, where the model for data privacy and security is secondary, not primary. If this is indeed verified, no one should ever use Facebook for anything truly private, regardless of what apologies or excuses are made.
It is difficult to think of something like this, where private emails are accidentally disclosed publicly en masse, happening with gmail (or any other email service).
If it is indeed verified I would be the first one to jump on the bandwaggon and delete the account and tell others to do so. But so far I have not seen anything to verify it and more reports on Facebook claims that it is indeed old user to user wall posts (something I remember and used in the past personally) just showing up from people now liking them which at the time they didn't have a like button.
Regardless of what the actual situation is, if these posts are being brought to people's attention by friends because they seem sensitive and are now more prominent than they once were, isn't that a concern in and of itself?
Good point. Mass hysteria being used as a carrier for sudden bursts of clarity would be an interesting phenomenon in itself. Thousands of people suddenly realizing "Oh god, what have I been doing?"
Edit: The more I read about this, the more it seems to me that this is what is going on. I think this has interesting implications for the "Privacy is dead" attitude. It suggests to me that, contrary to popular belief in some circles, people are not ok with their diminished privacy.. they just haven't been thinking about it.
I wouldn't put this on the users' lack of clarity as much as I would blame Facebook for changing the course of it's features so much so that this is now happening to people. People were using the site as it was once intended and we can't blame them for being infuriated when the logic behind that usage changes. To me it's no different than Quora deciding to make all of your posts public without the chance to opt-in, except because of Facebook's privacy settings mess, it isn't easily reversible without severely crippling the content you've posted over the entirety of your account's lifespan.
Fair point. In either event I think it is fair to say that this demonstrates that privacy is valuable to consumers, despite what certain people might have us believe.
That strikes me as a very 'Facebook-eque' attitude towards the privacy of others. I am sure that if he were comfortable posting a screenshot of it, he would have done so without needing prompting.
Surely, somewhere, somewhen, somebody sent a private message the contents of which are not particularly private. I know most of my private messages consist of "what are you doing Friday?"
Think about what you're asking for here. You are essentially asking to compound the error facebook made by making a screenshot of their private communications and posting it on yet another open forum.
That's like asking a rape victim to show her bruises publicly or you won't believe it. Pics or it didn't happen applies to lots of stuff but when there are a lot of people with pretty good reputations making the exact same claims then you might want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Facebook is not above making mistakes and the number of people right here that make these claims is too large to simply be ignored or waved away. Clearly something has changed for some people, now the question is how many people are affected and what can be done about it.
That's like asking a rape victim to show her bruises publicly or you won't believe it
I get the parallel, but still, the rape analogy feels tasteless and out-of-scale. May I suggest "that's like asking someone what their password is to prove that it was stolen"
It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment but I should have thought about it a bit longer. The weirdness of the request is what angered me to the point of being careless with words.
It's pretty easy to redact a message so as to show they are the same message but without giving away sensitive info. Hell, some of these are probably benign messages like "sure meet you there" or something anyway. Your analogy is ridiculous.
Yes, but 'sure meet you there' wouldn't be quite juicy enough to satisfy the 'that was not private enough so therefore it wasn't a private message' crowd.
With the way sharding works I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was real but only affected an extremely small portion of the users, and in such a way that stuff that had been pushed into the mists of time made it back to the present somehow. That alone would qualify as a bug, the fact that facebook would shine the spotlight on old data like this is worrysome all by itself. If the data was private or in some other way hidden from normal view and suddenly given a much more prominent spot without the users being made aware of that ahead of time then that would be much more serious still.
"Yes, but 'sure meet you there' wouldn't be quite juicy enough to satisfy the 'that was not private enough so therefore it wasn't a private message' crowd."
The whole point of showing it next to a screenshot of the email or the message in the private inbox is to confirm that it is PRIVATE regardless of the actual content. There might be somebody out there who has an unusual interest in other people's private messages, but I think the vast majority of people are looking for something a bit more real than "this happened to me."
You heard it here folks, an engineering bug that didn't actually happen is tantamount to rape. Perhaps we should stop referring to them alleged bugs and start calling them rapes. I'm sure the rape victims in the audience would love this idea.
Well it IS happening, and it's spreading. People are pissed.
I found private messages published. And no, no pics because, you know, they were supposed to be private. And I am very careful on the matter. I am very annoyed to see it downplayed.
Keep in mind that facebook's engineering philosophy is to push new code out every single day. This means that there is little to no QA on code push. Every engineer takes responsibility for their own code push and because people are human they mess up from time to time. I don't think this means that the culture is broken... there are simply pros and cons to on the fly site builds.
It looks like it's only for old messages. My guess is that what happened is that they migrated some old messages to a new model. Maybe they had a mess of different old models, and some of them where converted to the wrong kind. I guess they were not careful enough with it, I just hope they will be able to revert it...
With any luck they'll start undeleting less-than-charitable picture comments I removed once the subjects of those comments joined Facebook. You know they still have them.
It is difficult to think of something like this, where private emails are accidentally disclosed publicly en masse, happening with gmail (or any other email service).