Private Facebook messages going public?
There are rumors swirling out there that private messages on Facebook have been popping up on people’s very public timeline. You can see how that could be a slight issue. That’s like posting your emails to Facebook.
However, the social media giant is denying that this bug exists and says that these are just old public posts. One would have to think that people would know the difference, right?
“A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline,” Fred Wolens of Facebook Policy Communications said in a statement. “Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.”
Wolens was then asked if such a bug were even possible.
“While not quite a technical impossibility, these systems are run on two separate backends which would require a non-trivial amount of work for this bug to be real,” he said.
We haven’t seen any evidence of this, but it’s always something to keep an eye on.
