4 ms·

Could this just have been a good old-fashioned programming bug, rather than spamming or malicious intent?

• claudius 13y ago
  How could this possibly be a programming bug?
  • apike 13y ago
    Of course it was a bug. It seems clear to me they were experimenting with some texting functionality where Path would notify users of things, it made it to production with bugs, and some subset of users got this terrible behaviour. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
    • anonymoushn 13y ago
      It would need to be about three bugs. First, there's the bug where users who say that Path can't have their address books get their address books sent to Path. Second, there's the bug where their servers think the user has photos that he does not have. Third, there's the bug where their servers think the user wants to share these photos with Path's list of phone-number contacts for that user. This does not seem like the most likely scenario to me.
    • andreigheorghe 13y ago
      What are the reasons that make you so sure, though? To me, it's not clear at all just from the symptoms that it is a bug. It could just as well be a feature they're only testing out on 0.1% of the user base to see how their engagement or whatever improves.
      • apike 13y ago
        Maybe I'm naive, but it seems just so insanely bad that I assumed no product manager or engineer would intentionally cause this behavior.
        • amartya916 13y ago
          I am sure you've already done so, but in case you haven't, read about Path's previous snafus. Recently fined by the FTC: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026985/ftc-fines-maker-of-path-app-800-000-for-privacy-violations.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026985/ftc-fines-maker-of-pa...
          • apike 13y ago
            Collecting and using my private info to, say, recommend friends in their UI is something I could imagine a product manager doing on purpose. Creepy, but you can see why they would think this is helpful. Spamming every number in my phone book with texts about photos that don't exist at 6am is not something I could imagine a product manager doing on purpose.
  • smsm42 13y ago
    Oh, I can easily see possible scenarios. For example: have a functionality when you add a contact to the list of contacts, send her a message welcoming her, after asking the user if it's OK. Reuse the same code in the part of the application where you initialize the database from existing contacts. Put wrong defaults there so that the code does not ask "send welcome message?" (because that'd be stupid - of course you don't want to ask somebody 200 times for each of the entries in initial import) but still sends one. Boom! - initial import causes 200 welcome messages to be sent. Happens more than you'd like. Something like that happened to me too, in different form and was caught in testing, nowhere near production, but still.
• jonny_eh 13y ago
  Even if that's true, it's a pretty awful bug. I'm not aware of FB or Google ever doing something like this.