14 ms·

Facebook bug set 14M users' sharing settings to public

243 points by uptown 8y ago

misterbowfinger 8y ago
Man. It'd suck to be the dev that committed that. Even blameless post-mortems would feel rough.
- coldcode 8y ago
  Facebook has a fully automated testing pipeline, supposedly with few human gatekeepers but not testers, and use Facebook employees as the only real testers. That gives me no confidence at all.
  - cryptozeus 8y ago
    One bug and suddenly all the confidence is lost ? Imagine how many successful deployments happen all the time. Human testers are shitty too, bugs are missed all the time.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      * One bug and suddenly all the confidence is lost ?* If only this was Facebook's first bug.
- CryoLogic 8y ago
  That is, if it truly was unintentional. In the past year, most of the "data leaks" from Facebook where entirely intentional. They might market them as accidental, but you don't accidentally write an API to expose data intentionally.
ladzoppelin 8y ago
Facebook would change peoples settings on purpose during updates back in 2009. Its the reason I quit the site. "A Facebook spokesperson said the notification is the start of new proactive and transparent way for the company to handle issues going forward" Facebook deserves everything they have coming. IMO, They also need to rethink their PR strategy. I would of given them a second chance and tried the site but every excuse is insulting. Wow
- mikestew 8y ago
  Facebook would change peoples settings on purpose during updates back in 2009. Man, has it been that long? W/o reading the article first, I expected the first comment to be "needs [2010] in the title", because I, too, dropped FB the day I found out that all pictures were now public (and, IIRC, "by design"). I subsequently figured it was an old story about that. But it happened again recently, huh?
  - codeflo 8y ago
    It happened several times, which makes you wonder. They have all this great engineering talent and a really fantastic test infrastructure, yet somehow never managed to write a unit test that checks if a simple boolean value doesn't toggle during an update. It's quite a mystery.
- arielweisberg 8y ago
  Heh. That is exactly the incident that had me quit Facebook and stop real sharing on social media.
typicalbender 8y ago
"Facebook changed every post by those users during the affected time period to private, including posts that people may have meant to share publicly. The company told CNN it took five days to make those changes." The headline and the article seem to be contradictory. Anyone know if the article is wrong or the headline is wrong? It looks like it just might be that paragraph that got it backwards since there is a direct quote later that talks about posts being automatically suggested as public.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  Your understanding is wrong. 1. Facebook defaulted a bunch of posts to public, when they should have been something else. 2. Users posted a bunch of things with this unexpected default 3. As one part of fixing the bug, Facebook changed all posts made with the unexpected default to private. They were attempting to undo the damage. Some of the posts they made private probably were intended to be public, so they made things worse for certain users.
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    Better than damaging for all private ones. Think about which one is more serious on privacy.
joekrill 8y ago
While "move fast and break things" sounds great and works well in a lot of cases, this is the huge problem with it. There are real consequences. And with GDPR and other privacy laws, this is will start equating to real money lost. I expect that motto to be retired much the same way Google got rid of "Don't be evil".
- racl101 8y ago
  Change it to: "Tread carefully."
  - brlewis 8y ago
    Already changed https://medium.com/halting-problem/facebooks-new-motto-move-fast-and-please-please-please-don-t-break-anything-8aefdd405d15 https://medium.com/halting-problem/facebooks-new-motto-move-...
- cjhveal 8y ago
  If I understand the situation, they changed it[0] in 2014 to "move fast with stable infra". [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-things-isnt-how-we-operate-anymore/ https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-thi...
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    They still break a lot. Like A LOT!
  - aylmao 8y ago
    Well, infra is only one part of the system. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I feel like Facebook doesn't crash much nowadays so their infra is definitely stable, but their product code could use more work.
  - workinthehead 8y ago
    They said "infra" so you know they know what they are doing!
- 8y ago
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
Any European users affected?
justboxing 8y ago
> "Due to a technical error, we recommend you review the audience of your recent posts. Learn more." What does that even mean? What possible action can a user do to "undo" any damage? You can't really make the people who saw your posts "unsee" it. Also, AFAIK, Facebook doesn't show the user stats of what public posts were accessed by 3rd parties like advertisers, random drive by Facebook user, so how is this statement in any way useful to the user?
- bertil 8y ago
  “Audience setting” is internal speak for what you would call the visibility of a post. “review the audience” is unambiguous internal speak for: change the visibility setting. I’m fairly certain that particular bug when through an emergency process and that the handful of copy-writers didn’t get to review. They are rather ruthless to pick those. I don’t remember what the grammar rule was to talk about visibility of the post, but I remember it was very specific precisely because of the distinction: who can and who has seen your posts.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I think the GP poster understood that much; what they were objecting to was the idea that there’s any point in changing who can see a post, after it’s already been sitting around for hours/days under the wrong ACL and has already ended up being shown in everyone’s timelines et al.
    - bertil 8y ago
      Facebook is not using ACL. The abstraction is quite different. But after being hammered by downvotes, I realise I probably should stop trying to provide context.
      - derefr 8y ago
        You're being downvoted because you tried to make a pedantic point about the particular algorithmic implementation of Facebook's per-post privacy while failing to address the thrust of the post you were replying to (after also failing to address the thrust of the GGGP post due to a different misunderstanding.) This is especially galling (to everyone, apparently) when the particular algorithmic implementation is irrelevant to the thrust of the post you replied to, and so the "context" you're attempting to provide is not only unnecessary to provide, but is actually distracting from the point. It's reminiscent of a politician attempting to perform an act of rhetorical judo to avoid actually answering a question. Let me restate, because obviously those people who downvoted you actually want an answer to this question: why would Facebook attempt to portray changing the privacy settings on a post hours/days after it goes out with the wrong privacy settings, as a sensible plan of action to suggest for fixing the problem they created? Everyone's already seen what you posted. Changing the privacy setting isn't a time-machine that'll make them un-see it. Why didn't Facebook instead suggest, say, making a post reaching out to anyone who your not-so-private-after-all posts may have inadvertently hurt? That's something that actually has a chance of ameliorating the problem.
compiler-guy 8y ago
Of note here, which has always been true, but worth remembering: Facebook can change the visibility of your posts however it likes, whenever it likes. The only thing stopping them is their own ethics. (And possibly a big fine in Europe, but that will be cold comfort to anyone whose personal info is exposed thus.) Not that it _did_, but it certainly could, and will do so if it thinks it has good enough reason.
- bertil 8y ago
  No: Facebook can change the algo that picks the default setting of the visibility of your future posts. Software changes are rather easy at Facebook (although that particular tool would surely have a ton of people monitoring it, including quantitative social scientists who don’t monitor a lot of pages). Changing the graph (stored information) is pretty much impossible without a lot of checks. That distinction is key to understand control at Facebook.
  - compiler-guy 8y ago
    Facebook changed the visibility of the already-posted posts that had the bad default, without regard to user intent. All they did was decide to do it. Sure they have internal controls so a rogue engineer can't do it. But if Facebook, as a company, decides it wants to mess with your settings, it can, and it does. This event is an existence proof of that.
    - bertil 8y ago
      To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? I can’t start to imagine how they would do that, but “it took five days” points at a very kludgey hack.
      - pdpi 8y ago
        > To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? And also making private anything you legitimately wanted made public, because they couldn't tell the difference.
djrogers 8y ago
Based on the history of these things, it seems likely that the reported 14M number will grow over time once the initial furor has died down...
- mygo 8y ago
  that’s already a giant number. if that’s the strategy they shouldn’t start the bidding with a giant number.
  - djrogers 8y ago
    They started with a much bigger number with Cambridge Analytica, then it grew much much larger.
    - mygo 8y ago
      to the average person... the shock value of 14 million is pretty much the same shock value as 1 billion. they’re both beyond the buku horizon.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  When Yahoo was breached it went from 50 million accounts compromised to all of them. This number will definitely grow.
- jhgg 8y ago
  I highly doubt it. The new feature they were testing was probably rolled out to a % of their user-base (as any sane company rolling out new features does.) Facebook has tools that lets them target experiments to specific subsets of their users. Chances are this experiment targeted 14M users in a very specific geography (generally English speaking users probably in the US/CA/NZ/AU). Most likely, this sounds like a UI bug where users in the experiment had their default "audience" for their posts set to Public, instead of the value that it is usually set to. The UI probably showed that it was being posted to the public, but obviously, if you weren't looking at that you'd probably expect it to have been the same as your previous default.
amaccuish 8y ago
The notification is so misleading: "X, we recently discovered a technical error between May 18 and 27 that automatically suggested a public audiance when you were creating posts" My problem is the "suggested a public audience", makes it sound so minor, and really your fault for going along with the "suggestion".
Simulacra 8y ago
That wasn't no bug, that was a feature!
1290cc 8y ago
Maybe someone from FB can chime in and prove whether this is true but wouldn't FB take a copy of ANY data that is made public for any portion of time? So it may have been public for a day but ultimately that data is now stored and available for 3rd parties to leverage. This is exactly what something like Archive.org would do.
monksy 8y ago
How many engineers suggested functional tests for this?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mtgx 8y ago
Move fast and break (users') things.
amadeuspzs 8y ago
What's Facebook?
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  What did you think your comment was contributing? It's low-effort and isn't really the sort of thing that's welcome in this community.
  - amadeuspzs 8y ago
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/977209817012977665?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/977209817012977665?lang=...
oprah2018 8y ago
You had ONE job, Facebook!
smolder 8y ago
So, a history of bugs that increase permissiveness. Were there ever any bugs that set things more restrictively? Or are these "bugs" a reflection of their priorities, i.e. willful neglect.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  They had plenty of annoying popups saying "Oh you're posting publicly; did you know you can restrict the audience? Maybe you want to post to your friends only?". Over the years, I believe they were also tightening up the default visibility settings for new accounts.
itomato 8y ago
How can we be sure this wasn't a "Feature"?
runesoerensen 8y ago
Facebook's response https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/audience-selector-error/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/audience-selector-error...
kerng 8y ago
This is not the first time, obviously. I remember vividly how they sometime 2008 or 2009 made all pictures in the Profile Pictures folder public - that's when I realized they can't be trusted at all with protecting information.
osrec 8y ago
Facebook's faux pas seem to be coming thick and fast, yet it makes no dent in their apparent popularity. What sort of a beast is this that it can't be slayed by scandal after scandal?! I mean, much of the media hate it, and they jump on any chance to berate it. I personally hate it, as do a lot of other "geeky people" I know. Yet still everyone wants to use it, all the time. It's like no one actually cares about privacy. Or what Facebook provides in exchange for privacy is somehow worth it? To me, the value proposition of Facebook simply doesn't add up... I guess much of the world strongly disagrees.
- Jonnerz 8y ago
  Much of the world just don't care, especially young people. It's as simple as that really.
  - vixen99 8y ago
    That's for sure. So one interesting question, what might happen that would lead them to care?
- jimjimjim 8y ago
  sign of the times. there are no repercussions anymore. uber, telcos, <cough>white house</cough>, facebook, airlines (beaten anybody up recently?), fifa, equifax. and it sucks.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Were they ever? I read corporate horror stories as far back as corporations exist, and until the last ~100 years, the world was a totally fucked up mess anyway.
- ledfrog 8y ago
  I've asked people that question and it seems the trade off is that feeling of connection. The validation that comes from sharing moments and the happy feelings it brings you when you can brag about something. In exchange for this, people are relatively lax about their privacy. I'm sure there's also a bunch of people that want to get famous so they will absorb all the followers, likes, shares and comments they can get. I once overheard two girls talking about guys they liked at school and I shit you not, they were rating them based on how many Instagram followers they had...
newscracker 8y ago
This is not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last. Facebook is too big and way off the path for anyone's good, IMO. As someone who uses Facebook in a limited manner for a specific topic, I set my audience to public a long time ago. If it's something I can't say in public (on Facebook), I don't trust or allow that information to be on Facebook. Period. There are other platforms for exchanging information that Facebook just cannot be trusted to handle correctly. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
- jaytong 8y ago
  Seems like they can't catch a break recently. Stopped using newsfeed altogether, only use messenger for groups/folks I don't have numbers for.
  - newscracker 8y ago
    I stopped using the newsfeed and the time line a little no time ago. I post in some groups, where the reality is that I don't know most of the people there and what they might or might not do with my content. For me, if there's one thing Facebook has succeeded at, it's a good amount of self-censorship.
    - kevingrahl 8y ago
      Facebook did some research on self censorship in 2013 (I’m sure there are others but I just happened to remember the paper). > “Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship in the time period, and provide specific evidence supporting the theory that a user’s “perceived audience” lies at the heart of the issue: posts are censored more frequently than comments, with status updates and posts directed at groups censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated.” - Source - https://research.fb.com/publications/self-censorship-on-facebook/ https://research.fb.com/publications/self-censorship-on-face...
      - codeflo 8y ago
zamalek 8y ago
This is terrifying for people who shared things thinking that they were private (especially those suffering harassment). However, as we know, nothing you share on Facebook is private. Your posts are public regardless of what you set them to. So set your default to public. If you feel as you need to change it for something, don't post at all.
- LocalPCGuy 8y ago
  Exactly - I did this a few years ago, and never even blink when I read this stuff. About the only thing I change the privacy setting on is if I'm traveling or similar and want to check in or post pics on the road.
- ledfrog 8y ago
  I remember a very long time ago, I inadvertently changed a photo album I never deleted from private to public and it contained photos of an ex. I got a call from my then-current girlfriend with a boatload of questions. I started realizing shortly after how damaging this new (at the time) social media stuff could be. In my case, it was something relatively small, but I can't imagine what kind of stuff other people might have that could expose them on so many fronts. For this and other reasons, I slowly weaned myself off social media and never really looked back. I just use various accounts for logins and a few check-ins here and there.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    I didn't have a Facebook account for the longest time, but having moved countries it sadly became necessary. These days I rarely post directly, only update friends and family on their posted statuses. My distaste is slowly growing into action, there isn't a Facebook competitor right now (tweets, toots, or OpenSocial updates are Twitter, not Facebook). One of these days I will compete with them for no price more than staying connected.
ryanmccullagh 8y ago
Who's the software engineer that did this?
jimjimjim 8y ago
move fast and break stuff. meh, who cares if the broken stuff hurts other people. You know the score, pal! If you're not facebook, you're little people.
reilly3000 8y ago
That is sloppy ops for a tech giant. No automated tests to see if post permissions are working right? QA missed it? User reports were ignored for too long? 5 days is a long time for such a big hole to be open.
- workinthehead 8y ago
  Yes, and that's one way we know it's a lie.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
I guess at least this is seen as a bug now? I don't know if it was just a bug affecting me or some weird test or something going on but this used to happen to me all the time - every time they'd change anything they'd change all my defaults to public. It did stop at some point, though I haven't checked in a while and don't trust them at all. They used to reset my email settings all the time too, but I stopped paying attention to that and just told Gmail everything Facebook send is spam which worked much better.
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
it just struck me that recurring bugs that change your privacy settings might not fall under GDPR.
arbitragy 8y ago
In spite of all the controversy, Facebook is at all-time highs. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform in 5, 10, or 25 years.

243 points by uptown 8y ago

misterbowfinger 8y ago

Man. It'd suck to be the dev that committed that. Even blameless post-mortems would feel rough.

coldcode 8y ago
Facebook has a fully automated testing pipeline, supposedly with few human gatekeepers but not testers, and use Facebook employees as the only real testers. That gives me no confidence at all.
- cryptozeus 8y ago
  One bug and suddenly all the confidence is lost ? Imagine how many successful deployments happen all the time. Human testers are shitty too, bugs are missed all the time.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    * One bug and suddenly all the confidence is lost ?* If only this was Facebook's first bug.
CryoLogic 8y ago
That is, if it truly was unintentional. In the past year, most of the "data leaks" from Facebook where entirely intentional. They might market them as accidental, but you don't accidentally write an API to expose data intentionally.

ladzoppelin 8y ago

Facebook would change peoples settings on purpose during updates back in 2009. Its the reason I quit the site. "A Facebook spokesperson said the notification is the start of new proactive and transparent way for the company to handle issues going forward" Facebook deserves everything they have coming. IMO, They also need to rethink their PR strategy. I would of given them a second chance and tried the site but every excuse is insulting. Wow

mikestew 8y ago
Facebook would change peoples settings on purpose during updates back in 2009. Man, has it been that long? W/o reading the article first, I expected the first comment to be "needs [2010] in the title", because I, too, dropped FB the day I found out that all pictures were now public (and, IIRC, "by design"). I subsequently figured it was an old story about that. But it happened again recently, huh?
- codeflo 8y ago
  It happened several times, which makes you wonder. They have all this great engineering talent and a really fantastic test infrastructure, yet somehow never managed to write a unit test that checks if a simple boolean value doesn't toggle during an update. It's quite a mystery.
arielweisberg 8y ago
Heh. That is exactly the incident that had me quit Facebook and stop real sharing on social media.

typicalbender 8y ago

"Facebook changed every post by those users during the affected time period to private, including posts that people may have meant to share publicly. The company told CNN it took five days to make those changes." The headline and the article seem to be contradictory. Anyone know if the article is wrong or the headline is wrong? It looks like it just might be that paragraph that got it backwards since there is a direct quote later that talks about posts being automatically suggested as public.

compiler-guy 8y ago
Your understanding is wrong. 1. Facebook defaulted a bunch of posts to public, when they should have been something else. 2. Users posted a bunch of things with this unexpected default 3. As one part of fixing the bug, Facebook changed all posts made with the unexpected default to private. They were attempting to undo the damage. Some of the posts they made private probably were intended to be public, so they made things worse for certain users.
- yeukhon 8y ago
  Better than damaging for all private ones. Think about which one is more serious on privacy.

joekrill 8y ago

While "move fast and break things" sounds great and works well in a lot of cases, this is the huge problem with it. There are real consequences. And with GDPR and other privacy laws, this is will start equating to real money lost. I expect that motto to be retired much the same way Google got rid of "Don't be evil".

racl101 8y ago
Change it to: "Tread carefully."
- brlewis 8y ago
  Already changed https://medium.com/halting-problem/facebooks-new-motto-move-fast-and-please-please-please-don-t-break-anything-8aefdd405d15 https://medium.com/halting-problem/facebooks-new-motto-move-...
cjhveal 8y ago
If I understand the situation, they changed it[0] in 2014 to "move fast with stable infra". [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-things-isnt-how-we-operate-anymore/ https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-thi...
- yeukhon 8y ago
  They still break a lot. Like A LOT!
- aylmao 8y ago
  Well, infra is only one part of the system. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I feel like Facebook doesn't crash much nowadays so their infra is definitely stable, but their product code could use more work.
- workinthehead 8y ago
  They said "infra" so you know they know what they are doing!
8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

Any European users affected?

justboxing 8y ago

> "Due to a technical error, we recommend you review the audience of your recent posts. Learn more." What does that even mean? What possible action can a user do to "undo" any damage? You can't really make the people who saw your posts "unsee" it. Also, AFAIK, Facebook doesn't show the user stats of what public posts were accessed by 3rd parties like advertisers, random drive by Facebook user, so how is this statement in any way useful to the user?

bertil 8y ago
“Audience setting” is internal speak for what you would call the visibility of a post. “review the audience” is unambiguous internal speak for: change the visibility setting. I’m fairly certain that particular bug when through an emergency process and that the handful of copy-writers didn’t get to review. They are rather ruthless to pick those. I don’t remember what the grammar rule was to talk about visibility of the post, but I remember it was very specific precisely because of the distinction: who can and who has seen your posts.
- derefr 8y ago
  I think the GP poster understood that much; what they were objecting to was the idea that there’s any point in changing who can see a post, after it’s already been sitting around for hours/days under the wrong ACL and has already ended up being shown in everyone’s timelines et al.
  - bertil 8y ago
    Facebook is not using ACL. The abstraction is quite different. But after being hammered by downvotes, I realise I probably should stop trying to provide context.
    - derefr 8y ago
      You're being downvoted because you tried to make a pedantic point about the particular algorithmic implementation of Facebook's per-post privacy while failing to address the thrust of the post you were replying to (after also failing to address the thrust of the GGGP post due to a different misunderstanding.) This is especially galling (to everyone, apparently) when the particular algorithmic implementation is irrelevant to the thrust of the post you replied to, and so the "context" you're attempting to provide is not only unnecessary to provide, but is actually distracting from the point. It's reminiscent of a politician attempting to perform an act of rhetorical judo to avoid actually answering a question. Let me restate, because obviously those people who downvoted you actually want an answer to this question: why would Facebook attempt to portray changing the privacy settings on a post hours/days after it goes out with the wrong privacy settings, as a sensible plan of action to suggest for fixing the problem they created? Everyone's already seen what you posted. Changing the privacy setting isn't a time-machine that'll make them un-see it. Why didn't Facebook instead suggest, say, making a post reaching out to anyone who your not-so-private-after-all posts may have inadvertently hurt? That's something that actually has a chance of ameliorating the problem.

compiler-guy 8y ago

Of note here, which has always been true, but worth remembering: Facebook can change the visibility of your posts however it likes, whenever it likes. The only thing stopping them is their own ethics. (And possibly a big fine in Europe, but that will be cold comfort to anyone whose personal info is exposed thus.) Not that it _did_, but it certainly could, and will do so if it thinks it has good enough reason.

bertil 8y ago
No: Facebook can change the algo that picks the default setting of the visibility of your future posts. Software changes are rather easy at Facebook (although that particular tool would surely have a ton of people monitoring it, including quantitative social scientists who don’t monitor a lot of pages). Changing the graph (stored information) is pretty much impossible without a lot of checks. That distinction is key to understand control at Facebook.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  Facebook changed the visibility of the already-posted posts that had the bad default, without regard to user intent. All they did was decide to do it. Sure they have internal controls so a rogue engineer can't do it. But if Facebook, as a company, decides it wants to mess with your settings, it can, and it does. This event is an existence proof of that.
  - bertil 8y ago
    To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? I can’t start to imagine how they would do that, but “it took five days” points at a very kludgey hack.
    - pdpi 8y ago
      > To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? And also making private anything you legitimately wanted made public, because they couldn't tell the difference.

djrogers 8y ago

Based on the history of these things, it seems likely that the reported 14M number will grow over time once the initial furor has died down...

mygo 8y ago
that’s already a giant number. if that’s the strategy they shouldn’t start the bidding with a giant number.
- djrogers 8y ago
  They started with a much bigger number with Cambridge Analytica, then it grew much much larger.
  - mygo 8y ago
    to the average person... the shock value of 14 million is pretty much the same shock value as 1 billion. they’re both beyond the buku horizon.
paulie_a 8y ago
When Yahoo was breached it went from 50 million accounts compromised to all of them. This number will definitely grow.
jhgg 8y ago
I highly doubt it. The new feature they were testing was probably rolled out to a % of their user-base (as any sane company rolling out new features does.) Facebook has tools that lets them target experiments to specific subsets of their users. Chances are this experiment targeted 14M users in a very specific geography (generally English speaking users probably in the US/CA/NZ/AU). Most likely, this sounds like a UI bug where users in the experiment had their default "audience" for their posts set to Public, instead of the value that it is usually set to. The UI probably showed that it was being posted to the public, but obviously, if you weren't looking at that you'd probably expect it to have been the same as your previous default.

amaccuish 8y ago

The notification is so misleading: "X, we recently discovered a technical error between May 18 and 27 that automatically suggested a public audiance when you were creating posts" My problem is the "suggested a public audience", makes it sound so minor, and really your fault for going along with the "suggestion".

Simulacra 8y ago

That wasn't no bug, that was a feature!

1290cc 8y ago

Maybe someone from FB can chime in and prove whether this is true but wouldn't FB take a copy of ANY data that is made public for any portion of time? So it may have been public for a day but ultimately that data is now stored and available for 3rd parties to leverage. This is exactly what something like Archive.org would do.

monksy 8y ago

How many engineers suggested functional tests for this?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mtgx 8y ago

Move fast and break (users') things.

amadeuspzs 8y ago

What's Facebook?

GavinMcG 8y ago
What did you think your comment was contributing? It's low-effort and isn't really the sort of thing that's welcome in this community.
- amadeuspzs 8y ago
  https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/977209817012977665?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/977209817012977665?lang=...

oprah2018 8y ago

You had ONE job, Facebook!

smolder 8y ago

So, a history of bugs that increase permissiveness. Were there ever any bugs that set things more restrictively? Or are these "bugs" a reflection of their priorities, i.e. willful neglect.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
They had plenty of annoying popups saying "Oh you're posting publicly; did you know you can restrict the audience? Maybe you want to post to your friends only?". Over the years, I believe they were also tightening up the default visibility settings for new accounts.

itomato 8y ago

How can we be sure this wasn't a "Feature"?

runesoerensen 8y ago

Facebook's response https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/audience-selector-error/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/audience-selector-error...

kerng 8y ago

This is not the first time, obviously. I remember vividly how they sometime 2008 or 2009 made all pictures in the Profile Pictures folder public - that's when I realized they can't be trusted at all with protecting information.

osrec 8y ago

Facebook's faux pas seem to be coming thick and fast, yet it makes no dent in their apparent popularity. What sort of a beast is this that it can't be slayed by scandal after scandal?! I mean, much of the media hate it, and they jump on any chance to berate it. I personally hate it, as do a lot of other "geeky people" I know. Yet still everyone wants to use it, all the time. It's like no one actually cares about privacy. Or what Facebook provides in exchange for privacy is somehow worth it? To me, the value proposition of Facebook simply doesn't add up... I guess much of the world strongly disagrees.

Jonnerz 8y ago
Much of the world just don't care, especially young people. It's as simple as that really.
- vixen99 8y ago
  That's for sure. So one interesting question, what might happen that would lead them to care?
jimjimjim 8y ago
sign of the times. there are no repercussions anymore. uber, telcos, <cough>white house</cough>, facebook, airlines (beaten anybody up recently?), fifa, equifax. and it sucks.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Were they ever? I read corporate horror stories as far back as corporations exist, and until the last ~100 years, the world was a totally fucked up mess anyway.
ledfrog 8y ago
I've asked people that question and it seems the trade off is that feeling of connection. The validation that comes from sharing moments and the happy feelings it brings you when you can brag about something. In exchange for this, people are relatively lax about their privacy. I'm sure there's also a bunch of people that want to get famous so they will absorb all the followers, likes, shares and comments they can get. I once overheard two girls talking about guys they liked at school and I shit you not, they were rating them based on how many Instagram followers they had...

newscracker 8y ago

This is not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last. Facebook is too big and way off the path for anyone's good, IMO. As someone who uses Facebook in a limited manner for a specific topic, I set my audience to public a long time ago. If it's something I can't say in public (on Facebook), I don't trust or allow that information to be on Facebook. Period. There are other platforms for exchanging information that Facebook just cannot be trusted to handle correctly. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

jaytong 8y ago
Seems like they can't catch a break recently. Stopped using newsfeed altogether, only use messenger for groups/folks I don't have numbers for.
- newscracker 8y ago
  I stopped using the newsfeed and the time line a little no time ago. I post in some groups, where the reality is that I don't know most of the people there and what they might or might not do with my content. For me, if there's one thing Facebook has succeeded at, it's a good amount of self-censorship.
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    Facebook did some research on self censorship in 2013 (I’m sure there are others but I just happened to remember the paper). > “Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship in the time period, and provide specific evidence supporting the theory that a user’s “perceived audience” lies at the heart of the issue: posts are censored more frequently than comments, with status updates and posts directed at groups censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated.” - Source - https://research.fb.com/publications/self-censorship-on-facebook/ https://research.fb.com/publications/self-censorship-on-face...
    - codeflo 8y ago

zamalek 8y ago

This is terrifying for people who shared things thinking that they were private (especially those suffering harassment). However, as we know, nothing you share on Facebook is private. Your posts are public regardless of what you set them to. So set your default to public. If you feel as you need to change it for something, don't post at all.

LocalPCGuy 8y ago
Exactly - I did this a few years ago, and never even blink when I read this stuff. About the only thing I change the privacy setting on is if I'm traveling or similar and want to check in or post pics on the road.
ledfrog 8y ago
I remember a very long time ago, I inadvertently changed a photo album I never deleted from private to public and it contained photos of an ex. I got a call from my then-current girlfriend with a boatload of questions. I started realizing shortly after how damaging this new (at the time) social media stuff could be. In my case, it was something relatively small, but I can't imagine what kind of stuff other people might have that could expose them on so many fronts. For this and other reasons, I slowly weaned myself off social media and never really looked back. I just use various accounts for logins and a few check-ins here and there.
- zamalek 8y ago
  I didn't have a Facebook account for the longest time, but having moved countries it sadly became necessary. These days I rarely post directly, only update friends and family on their posted statuses. My distaste is slowly growing into action, there isn't a Facebook competitor right now (tweets, toots, or OpenSocial updates are Twitter, not Facebook). One of these days I will compete with them for no price more than staying connected.

ryanmccullagh 8y ago

Who's the software engineer that did this?

jimjimjim 8y ago

move fast and break stuff. meh, who cares if the broken stuff hurts other people. You know the score, pal! If you're not facebook, you're little people.

reilly3000 8y ago

That is sloppy ops for a tech giant. No automated tests to see if post permissions are working right? QA missed it? User reports were ignored for too long? 5 days is a long time for such a big hole to be open.

workinthehead 8y ago
Yes, and that's one way we know it's a lie.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

I guess at least this is seen as a bug now? I don't know if it was just a bug affecting me or some weird test or something going on but this used to happen to me all the time - every time they'd change anything they'd change all my defaults to public. It did stop at some point, though I haven't checked in a while and don't trust them at all. They used to reset my email settings all the time too, but I stopped paying attention to that and just told Gmail everything Facebook send is spam which worked much better.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

it just struck me that recurring bugs that change your privacy settings might not fall under GDPR.

arbitragy 8y ago

In spite of all the controversy, Facebook is at all-time highs. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform in 5, 10, or 25 years.