Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 152 posts

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#121

Post by darien »

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…

Keep in mind that facebook's engineering philosophy is to push new code out every single day. This means that there is little to no QA on code push. Every engineer takes responsibility for their own code push and because people are human they mess up from time to time. I don't think this means that the culture is broken... there are simply pros and cons to on the fly site builds.

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#122

Post by bwaldrep »

drbawb wrote: post #77
wilfra wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct, if u go back and forth you can read whole conversations.

This 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.

Not 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

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#123

Post by klaut »

i 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 :|

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#124

Post by _pius »

arunv wrote: post #111

Hey 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 par…

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.

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.

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#125

Post by MartinCron »

tisme wrote: post #118
MartinCron wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like asking a rape victim to show her bruises publicly or you won't believe it I get the parallel, but still, the rape analogy feels tasteless and out-of-scale. May I suggest "that's like asking someone what their password is to prove that it was stolen"

You're 100% right, that was a bad call. It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment but I should have thought about it a bit longer. The weirdness of the request is what angered me to the point of being careless with words.

Hey, nobody is perfect with their spur-of-the-moment statements, especially when angry. Kudos to you for owning up to it.

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#126

Post by des »

arunv wrote: post #111

Hey 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 par…

On my timeline, I'm seeing the messages that friends added as they accepted my friend invite. Have those always been publicly visible?

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#127

Post by bwaldrep »

drbawb wrote: post #105
jenius wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

True, 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 dat…

No one is giving Facebook a free pass. We currently have no evidence whatsoever of a bug. On the other hand, we do know that wall posts could not be commented on pre-2009. Informal conversations were carried out with quick exchanges of wall posts. The whole conversation could be viewed with the "wall-to-wall" link. We used Facebook in a different way back then, and the conversations reflect that. If you have email notifications confirming that a private message is now public then please let us know. So far every person to check their records has found that there was no bug, they merely forgot how Facebook used to be.

According to one Facebook employee, private messages are stored on an entirely different system (MYSQL vs HBase). This seems perfectly reasonable, and precludes the possibility of a bad SQL query leaking private messages. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567009

Screenshot of old Facebook: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566962

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#128

Post by lbrandy »

drbawb wrote: post #105
jenius wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

True, 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 dat…

> 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'"?

Yes, it is hard to imagine, since they run on entirely different backends, one being mysql, one being hbase. See: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4567009

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#129

Post by s_henry_paulson »

jenius wrote: post #101
phwd wrote: post #98

(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 Example, http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/11111111111 Throw it in the Graph API Explorer https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer with /PROFILEID_POSTID or curl http://graph.facebook.com/PROFILEID_POSTID .…

The 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.

Just like the article says, there is no actual evidence of this yet.

Even a screenshot of a wall post, and another screenshot of the same message (in the messages folder) would be a start, but this is all just conjecture.

Re: Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

#130

Post by MartinCron »

_pius wrote: post #124
arunv wrote: post #111

Hey 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 par…

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. 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 post…

So you're suggesting that they replace the perception of a bug (data showing up when it shouldn't) with an actual bug (data not showing up when it should)?
Post reply on HN