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Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines
- kennu 14y agoSo it's, again, people forgetting that they used to write wall-to-wall messages in 2009, and that they were always visible to friends?
- snippyhollow 14y agoNot at all, I can assure you I had my _private_ conversations disclosed.
- fidotron 14y agoLikewise. Well, FB had kind of jumped the shark. I guess they wanted to leave no room for doubt about it.
- snippyhollow 14y agoI seem to be mistaken. However I was twice as stupid because I have hidden all these messages, and now I can't recover them on my timeline. I don't find them in my activity log (not under "hidden" nor "all"). Strangely, if I update my status and make it "hidden" in my timeline, it shows under "hidden" in the activity log...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- olasitarska 14y agoI don't think so - I had my totally private messages visible publicly..
- quadrahelix 14y agoScreenshot?
- skiplecariboo 14y agoi' m thinking the same. People please compare with email notification Facebook was sending at the time, provide screenshot to have a real proof !
- kamechan 14y agoi can confirm this too. 3 private message threads from 2009-2010 were on my wall with the privacy set to "friends". these were conversations right out of my private messages (which were also in my private messages). i'm deleting every facebook message as a result of this, which isn't easy as it has to be done one by one. i am in the US, but my UK friends are the ones who alerted me to it, as it was happening to them as well.
- zabar 14y agoSame thing here, I'm French and lots of my friends are having the bug as well. Lots of mention in the online newspaper too. I think once it's obvious that it's real, it's going to be a big deal for Facebook...
- hermannj314 14y agoSame here, my wife just called me crying because a large number of very private conversations she had with friends in the past are now visible on her timeline. Is the quickest option a manual delete? She is freaking out. Edit: I have set her privacy as strict as I can for now, but having pressed her on the topic, it isn't entirely certain that these messages were ever private. My comment to her was that even if they were always on your wall, you (in hindsight) don't think they should have been. Don't let Facebook convince you that you are wrong to have thought differently. Facebook's model doesn't work like the arrow of time, memories and conversations don't fade out naturally and disappear, they just stay there permanently. And today, your present self wonders what you were thinking that made you post that. When you add that to the fact that your social graph on Facebook was different 5 years ago than it is today, it makes sense that you naturally think certain things should have been private. In other words, you weren't fit in 2006 to know what in 2012 you would regret having posted and you aren't fit in 2012 to know what you are going to regret in 2018. If you really are freaking out about stuff that your past self thought should be known to the world, then do your future self a favor and stop putting your life on Facebook.
- zabar 14y agoquickest way to hide all of your friend's posts on your wall http://cl.ly/image/0s1e093Q0s1m http://cl.ly/image/0s1e093Q0s1m
- ohashi 14y agoThat is deeply disturbing. Is it showing up as new or does one have to go back and find them in the timeline when they were sent?
- pilgrim689 14y agoThey do not show up as new. The ones I found were mixed in with regular wall posts at the time of the post (2009 for mine).
- click170 14y agoIm surprised at Facebooks response, which is basically, "Your all crazy and there is no problem".
- zabar 14y agoTo me it looks that they were trying to buy some time. Trying to slow down the propagation of the story. But I think by now it's not fixed and it's obvious that it's very real, they will have to find something else...
- huzur79 14y agoHum http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-seeing-private-messages-pre-2009-showing-up-on-timelines-as-posted-by-friends/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-seei... "TechCrunch has investigated more, and we have found no evidence that the allegedly exposed posts were actually private messages. Their email receipts show they were in fact wall posts, and the posts do not appear in users’ Facebook Messages inbox. Facebook also says in no uncertain terms that there is absolutely no privacy bug. What people are seeing are old Wall postings, not private messages. A spokesperson tells TechCrunch: “Every report we’ve seen, we’ve gone back and checked. We haven’t seen one report that’s been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post.] A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. 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.”" This is why real reporters actually check into news stories first before publishing. I have yet to find a single shred of evidence anywhere that shows this has been verified and repeated. And I've been looking pretty hard for the last 30 minutes.
- tisme 14y ago> And I've been looking pretty hard for the last 30 minutes. You need not look so far, it's right here in this thread. People are confirming some of their private messages set to 'friends' only to be world visible on their timeline.
- Flimm 14y agoI'm deactivating my account because of this. I can manage without Facebook for a few days until they fix this bug.
- speg 14y ago+1 probably the quickest way to deal with this. Definitely beats deleting everything one-at-a-time.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- iyulaev 14y agoWow, a few weeks ago I was joking that if Facebook went through my private messages, I wouldn't be surprised, based on how scummy they've behaved in the past. Now apparently they've done this, except also shared everything with the whole world. I don't think I have to say this, but this is totally, 100% unacceptable. Back then I was using FB almost as a personal e-mail; the consequences of something like this could be cataclysmic. Can you imagine having your personal email "accidentally" posted to the general public?
- drbawb 14y agoThis is where someone typically parrots: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- Eric Schmidt; Executive Chairman, Google, Inc. To which I reply: I'm sorry, but my personal matters are personal _expressly because_ I've found people to be ignorant, bigoted, biased, or otherwise untrustworthy when it comes to matters of my identity. The fact that I could lose my job because of my thoughts on cannabis prohibition? Or that I could be disowned because of my political and [lack of] religious tendencies? These things are private not because they're wrong, Mr. Schmidt. They're private because _someone_ thinks they're wrong; and _someone_ is making decisions that could impact _my future_ by judging what's publicly available. I can no longer trust Facebook to be a secure messaging platform, which is basically all I used it for. I'm going to take charge of my web presence to whatever degree I can. I'm done letting large corporations abuse my data for their own gain, only to have shit like this happen.
- robk 14y agoDefinitely seeing a bit of this. It's inbound messages only, not outbound, but there are some things here definitely not meant to be seen by some friends.
- zabar 14y agowell, that's because your outbound messages are on your friends's wall, not yours.
- wilfra 14y agocorrect, if u go back and forth you can read whole conversations.
- drbawb 14y agoThis fact alone may also add a bit of credibility. If they were originally wall posts, your "threads" of conversation would be comments, not individual posts on each other's walls.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bwaldrep 14y agoNot true. This is the source of all the confusion. Originally you couldn't like or comment on wall posts. Conversations were individual posts on each other's walls. You could click the "wall-to-wall" link to view the whole conversation. This system gave conversations a different feel, and is now causing people to confuse them with private messages. Edit: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566956 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566956
- BasDirks 14y agoIf this is true, this is the first nail in a lot of very expensive coffins.
- dm8 14y agoLooks like FB have confirmed that these were old wall posts not the messages. Something is confusing.
- iyulaev 14y agoThey wouldn't ever lie, would they? Who are you going to believe, hundreds (or thousands) of FB users, or FB themselves?
- tedunangst 14y agoFB, no doubt. Users (of any site) are morons.
- wl 14y agoI can confirm that messages meant only for me were public on my wall and I have found messages I only intended for others public on their walls. They were most definitely NOT wall posts.
- danielweber 14y agoThis may sound snide, but you should contact TechCrunch. Offer up your proof to them on the terms that they don't republish it.
- jaylevitt 14y agoGo back and check the email confirmation you got for these messages.. did it say "...wrote on your Wall?"
- mwg66 14y agoI can confirm it too. Scary stuff. This is going to cause real world problems for a lot of people. I am done with Facebook now. Bye.
- drbawb 14y agoI see a few messages on my timeline; thankfully they are all _really_ unimportant. (One liners like "hey thanks again.", etc.) In principal, though, this bug shakes me to the core. Had it chosen to sample posts from 2010+ rather than 2008-2009; hell, I could easily be out of a job, or be dealing with some very upset family members. This is unacceptable; it violates any shred of trust I had left in Facebook as a platform. I'm done, too.
- tisme 14y agoBye-Bye Facebook.
- pilgrim689 14y agoEvery time I hear of Facebook developer philosophies, it's always "Move Fast and Break Things."... Not with 800 million people's private conversations, please.
- seiji 14y agoWhat can one do? They aren't a government entity -- you can't vote management out or change policies. They aren't regulated -- you have no complaint procedures or escalation mechanism. The best you can do is yell at them. They will gladly laugh at you through their young-and-rich-and-by-the-way-fu billionaire eyes. If they decide to make public every thing you've ever written in rolling 10 year intervals there is nothing you can do to stop them. The public has no idea how much can go wrong giving one entity essentially a copy of their entire private lives.
- huzur79 14y agoCan at least one person making these claims actually show any real proof about this? Just one person. I mean if its such a major flaw and verifiable I would expect at least one screen shoot showing this to be the case.
- randartie 14y agoHaven't seen concrete evidence yet though...I went ahead and looked through some profiles and there's stuff that looks very revealing, as though it were a private incoming conversation but then every time I click on them, the convo box expands and I can see that people 'liked it', meaning it was public from the start. Does anyone actually have real evidence? Maybe a screenshot of a message that CLEARLY is private and in no circumstance would they have forgot posting it on a wall THREE YEARS ago?
- palebluedot 14y agoThis 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).
- huzur79 14y agoIf 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- huzur79 14y agoPost a screen shot, lets see it.
- jlgreco 14y agoYou want a screenshot of his private message?
- tedunangst 14y agoSurely, 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?"
- 14y ago
- AlexMuir 14y agoIf I could short FB I would do so immediately. The fallout from this is going to be immense and long-term. I'd imagine they are facing two choices at FB right now: 1. Take the site down and prevent any further leaks. But accept the absolutely massive flak that would come from that. or 2. Continue to let the leaking happen and try to hotfix the bug. Be accused of failing to get a handle on it, but perhaps get away with it if fixed in the next 20 minutes. I'd bet that it's been like this for ages and only just been noticed. That will make fixing it a bit harder I should think - not simply a rollback to the previous push.
- soupboy 14y ago"Update: Facebook Confirms No Private Messages Appearing On Timeline. They’re Old Wall Posts."
- AlexMuir 14y agoSo TC have basically rewritten their entire article rather than add an update but anyway. It's probably not private messages - but it is messages that people think should be private TODAY. But it doesn't really matter - it's perception that matters here. And also I guess this is an illustration of how people's attitudes to FB have changed over time. "I would NEVER have shared this publicly." they say. But either they did, and now don't trust FB in the way they used to. Or they didn't and there's a bug. Neither are good for FB's brand.
- danielweber 14y agoSo TC have basically rewritten their entire article rather than add an update but anyway. There is no good way to answer "how do we correct a story that was completely wrong," but this seems to be a decent enough way to do it.
- tisme 14y agoThe correct way is a rectification. You leave the old story and point prominently to the correction at the top.
- CGamesPlay 14y agotl;dr: This is confirmed untrue at the bottom of the article.
- Lionleaf 14y agoI too thought I found private messages on my timeline. But it turns out they were indeed wallposts. It shows how much facebook has changed from a friends-only environment where you used the wall of people for semi-private chats, to a place where you have to be carefull and try to present yourself in a decent manner. Noone would ever use the wall in the same way it was used back then.
- randartie 14y agoI 100% think that this is what is happening. Before Facebook's chat feature became as prominent as it is, the number of 'trivial' wall-to-wall posts was very high, such as 'hey, what what you been up to?' or 'Thanks again'. These posts look like 'messages' because these days you would normally just send it as a message. So much press on this 'bug' but so little proof
- Lionleaf 14y agoYeah, I'm really certain too. Some of them seem surprisingly private though, so no wonder people get scared. It's still a bad thing that friend banter from long ago suddenly shows up for all your new friends / colleagues / family to see...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alexmuller 14y agoThis is exactly what I'm seeing. I just spent half an hour on the phone with my friend going over public posts from 2007 saying "WOAH, did we _really_ say that in public?". Every one was public. There were no examples of private messages showing up.
- ctingom 14y agoI just found some of my 'messages' on a friends public wall post from 2008. Not cool.
- jwpeddle 14y agoIt's no coincidence that people that have tried to verify this by comparing to email notifications have posted as much, and people that have "confirmed" based on memory have yet to do so and post the result of their verification. Do not trust your memory. Do not trust your assumptions. Just because this is plausible and everyone is claiming to be affected by it is not proof that it is in any way true. Check your notifications and find real evidence. No one in here has even claimed to have confirmed this with email, let alone posted any evidence.
- gatordan 14y agoFor a community that is usually quick to dismiss anecdotal evidence and fear, uncertainty, and doubt there seems to be quite a bit of all of the above going around in these comments. Given the update on the Tech Crunch article, and the fact this is regarding wall posts from three years ago (which people probably don't have the best recollection of) my two cents is for those that believe that this is affecting them to temporarily deactivate their FB account, and the rest of us wait until we see some follow up blog/news posts with hard evidence before we start yelling that the sky is falling.
- AlexMuir 14y agoYou know what's most interesting to me here? The tug between trusting my social network, and trusting FB and my own knowledge. My friends are ASSURING me that these are private messages. But every media outlet is now running the story that this is not true. And I have seen no evidence. So what do I believe?
- Havoc 14y agoEDIT: zevyoura pointed out that I misunderstood the comment I was replying to. Please ignore if not applicable. Trusting FB? I hope you are joking. You are the product being sold & FB will maximize the value of that at any cost. Its all one big scam: They provide endless privacy controls over what your friends can see, but discreetly forget to provide controls over what they can sell to advertisers.
- zevyoura 14y agoYou seem to have misconstrued the parent comment; he was talking about trusting FB (and by extension the media outlets that are reporting their statement as fact) over his social contacts on this issue specifically.
- Havoc 14y agoI see. Thank you for pointing that out. I've added a comment highlighting the situation.
- Evbn 14y agoHow does scaring people off the system benefit advertising sales? Think before you post. Even being greedy and selfish is not the same as desiring to ruin users lives.
- zabar 14y agoYes, in the end it's a good lesson about not trusting your memory too much and always trying to find proofs for what really happened.
- zabar 14y agoTrue or false, it's not going to help Facebook stock. Even if it's just people's perception, it actually matters a lot. Facebook need user to trust them on privacy issues, that's their core.
- toufka 14y agowha, 10% cliff-drop isn't good enough for you? http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:FB http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:FB
- ErrantX 14y agoIt might be only certain users affected; I have trawled through all the '09 posts appearing on my feed, and all of them are legit wall posts from then. Indeed; it was actually interesting to see how different Facebook was back then. So much more intimately public in terms of messaging and back/forth.
- j_s 14y agoOne thing I'm walking away from this incident with is a better understanding of the power of the Facebook PR machine. I would be interested in a timeline of how this whole process unfolded... too bad only companies like Google and Twitter will ever know for sure how it all spread.
- phwd 14y ago(Cross-posted on TC) These are all wall to wall posts. You can inspect for yourself using a Facebook Developer account. Rollover the timestamp grab the POSTID. http://www.facebook.com/PROFILEID/posts/POSTID http://www.facebook.com/PROFILEID/posts/POSTID Example, http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/11111111111 http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/11111111111 Throw it in the Graph API Explorer https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer with /PROFILEID_POSTID or curl http://graph.facebook.com/PROFILEID_POSTID http://graph.facebook.com/PROFILEID_POSTID. The evidence speaks for itself, it shows up as a Status object. You can push more with even browsing your conversation via http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAME?and=FRIENDUSERNAME&sk=wall http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAME?and=FRIENDUSERNAME&... I don't think that private messages can transform into wall posts with such ease. This would have to be intentional, it's not a simple click of a switch that can do something like some are thinking that is occurring.
- jenius 14y agoThe fact that they are showing up as wall posts means nothing - it just means that the bug was that facebook swapped messages for posts somehow, and now they are all showing up on the wall.
- drbawb 14y agoTrue, I wouldn't give Facebook a free pass on this alone. Is it really so hard to imagine that somebody, somewhere fudged a query and accidentally ran [pseudo-SQL] "UPDATE posts SET type='status' WHERE type='private-message' AND date = 'x' TO 'y'"? I'll admit, it's a bit of a stretch; but the fact that these show up as wall posts is not necessarily an indication that there is no bug. The bug may very well be that data has been manipulated to look like wall posts. Unless Facebook discloses that these posts were flagged as "status updates" _in an archived version of their dataset_ (specifically an archive before the issue first manifested), this information means practically nothing. We could gather from the bug itself that these were flagged as wall posts in FB's backend.
- bwaldrep 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- randartie 14y agoOld facebook that we don't remember: A post on someone's wall had a link to 'Wall-to-wall' or 'Write on wall', in place of what we have today, the commenting system. Screenshot: http://blog.hishamrana.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/facebook_new_layout1.png http://blog.hishamrana.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/facebo...
- arunv 14y agoHey guys - I work on Timeline here at Facebook and just wanted to chime in here. I've looked into a bunch of cases today where people were concerned their messages were showing up, but as has been pointed out in many places (e.g. techcrunch), there was no privacy violation here. If you've kept your old emails around (woohoo gmail!), one thing you can do is go back and look for the notification email you got for a particular post that you suspect was a message. There's a date search widget that makes this easier. I suspect you'll find it was a wall post. Another thing to note (for those that follow our technology), is that the backends for these two systems are entirely different. The messages backend is hbase-backed, designed for real-time communication more than history. The timeline backend is MySQL / C++ backed. Migrating data from hbase to MySQL would have to take months of effort. I know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future. That said, please rest assured that your inbox is not on your timeline.
- MartinCron 14y agoWhat a thoughtful response. I can imagine that you're having a very difficult day over there. Keep up the good work. Personally, I'm sad that all of my private messages have been so mundane that if they got out, it would be no big deal. I just looked through and I didn't find any meaningful dirt at all. What a shame.
- _pius 14y agoI know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future. You ought to be doing more than that, actually. Having been an early user of Facebook, I can assure you that people viewed wall-to-wall and other types of posts differently from how they view wall posts now. No one expected their data to be exposed this way, so for practical purposes, this is tantamount to a bug or data breach from the user perspective. Disabling this immediately for old posts or allowing users to opt out would be the right thing to do.
- 14y ago
- radicaldreamer 14y agoThe posts in this thread are a great example of the power of suggestion. It seems pretty clear at this point that there's no evidence that private messages were made public- other than hearsay.
- gagabity 14y agoI think its actually old private chat messages that are showing up.
- klaut 14y agoi went to check my fb timeline and indeed some messages between 2008-2009 DO look like they must've been private messages - people writing their home addresses and phone numbers and similar stuff.. i doubt these were public wall posts to begin with .. i can't find any old fb notification emails as i am deleting this things, unfortunatelly. but i does feel a bit scary :|
- Evbn 14y agoThe vast majority of FB users are confused enough to post this info publicly. Look at any "I got a new cell phone! Send me your digits!" post.
- conradfr 14y agoYes I think I see some old wall-to-wall posts but no messages. Now I don't even know if it's new as I never check my FB Timeline (which SUCKS btw) ... I just heard on the radio that the French government is monitoring the issue. Yes, that's what the country needs !? What is kinda hilarious is that even on 2007 people were confusing wall-to-wall messages with private messages !