Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 24, 2012, 8:20 PM UTC

randartie wrote: post #81

lionleaf wrote: post #57

I 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.

I 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

Post by rhizome » Mon, Sep 24, 2012, 8:24 PM UTC

zabar wrote: post #80

palebluedot wrote: post #35

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 ema…

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...

Post by Havoc » Mon, Sep 24, 2012, 8:31 PM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #82

You 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?

Post by stephengillie » Mon, Sep 24, 2012, 8:32 PM UTC

tisme wrote: post #79

RobAtticus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by danielweber » Mon, Sep 24, 2012, 8:38 PM UTC

wl wrote: post #40

dm8 wrote: post #23

Looks like FB have confirmed that these were old wall posts not the messages. Something is confusing.

I 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.