

Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines - toumhi
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-seeing-private-messages-pre-2009-showing-up-on-timelines-as-posted-by-friends/

======
arunv
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 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.

~~~
_pius
_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.

~~~
MartinCron
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)?

~~~
_pius
Nice troll.

~~~
MartinCron
I was maybe a little snarky, but totally serious.

------
phwd
(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 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&...](http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAME?and=FRIENDUSERNAME&sk=wall)

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
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.

~~~
drbawb
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 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
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>

------
palebluedot
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 emails are
accidentally disclosed publicly en masse, happening with gmail (or any other
email service).

~~~
huzur79
If 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.

~~~
mnicole
Regardless of what the actual situation is, if these posts are being brought
to people's attention by friends because they seem sensitive and are now more
prominent than they once were, isn't that a concern in and of itself?

~~~
jlgreco
Good point. Mass hysteria being used as a carrier for sudden bursts of clarity
would be an interesting phenomenon in itself. Thousands of people suddenly
realizing _"Oh god, what have I been doing?"_

Edit: The more I read about this, the more it seems to me that this is what is
going on. I think this has interesting implications for the _"Privacy is
dead"_ attitude. It suggests to me that, contrary to popular belief in some
circles, people are _not_ ok with their diminished privacy.. they just haven't
been thinking about it.

~~~
mnicole
I wouldn't put this on the users' lack of clarity as much as I would blame
Facebook for changing the course of it's features so much so that this is now
happening to people. People were using the site as it was once intended and we
can't blame them for being infuriated when the logic behind that usage
changes. To me it's no different than Quora deciding to make all of your posts
public without the chance to opt-in, except because of Facebook's privacy
settings mess, it isn't easily reversible without severely crippling the
content you've posted over the entirety of your account's lifespan.

~~~
jlgreco
Fair point. In either event I think it is fair to say that this demonstrates
that privacy _is_ valuable to consumers, despite what certain people might
have us believe.

------
kamechan
i 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.

~~~
hermannj314
Same 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
quickest way to hide all of your friend's posts on your wall
<http://cl.ly/image/0s1e093Q0s1m>

------
jwpeddle
It'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.

------
pilgrim689
Every 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
What 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.

~~~
manifold
The Data Protection Act 1998 would presumably apply in the UK and Ireland, and
the EU has a data protection directive. My expectation would be that they
could not disclose everything without consequence.

------
AlexMuir
If 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
"Update: Facebook Confirms No Private Messages Appearing On Timeline. They’re
Old Wall Posts."

~~~
AlexMuir
So 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
_So 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
The correct way is a rectification. You leave the old story and point
prominently to the correction at the top.

------
AlexMuir
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?

~~~
Havoc
EDIT: 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
You 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
I see. Thank you for pointing that out. I've added a comment highlighting the
situation.

------
gatordan
For 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.

------
mwg66
I 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
I 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.

------
huzur79
Can 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.

------
click170
Im surprised at Facebooks response, which is basically, "Your all crazy and
there is no problem".

~~~
huzur79
Hum

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-
seei...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-seeing-
private-messages-pre-2009-showing-up-on-timelines-as-posted-by-friends/)

"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
> 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.

~~~
jwpeddle
They aren't confirming anything. People are looking at wallposts and
thinking/remembering they are private messages, but everyone that has tried to
verify using email notifications has found only wallposts. Until someone shows
that a verifiable private message showed up publicly, than there's no reason
to continue spreading this. If it's a problem, it can easily be confirmed.
Even Techcrunch, who criticised Facebook's response have now backpedaled.

~~~
tisme
"Same 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."

Sounds pretty clear to me, I figure that the lady knows which conversation
were private and which weren't, if only by their content.

~~~
RobAtticus
Look at his edit, she isn't entirely sure they were private.

Amazing how many people have "confirmed" it but nobody has posted anything
verifiable. Just a screenshot of the private message inbox/email + the post on
the timeline. Redact as much as you want.

I've gone through the messages on my timeline, and truth be told I don't
remember the context of a lot of the messages, so it wouldn't surprise me if
people don't remember if something was private.

~~~
danielweber
This feels like the "everyone go find weird stuff in your Wendy's food now"
situation all over again. Except explained more by incompetence than malice.

I don't even like FB, but come on people.

------
Lionleaf
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.

~~~
randartie
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

~~~
Lionleaf
Yeah, 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...

------
Flimm
I'm deactivating my account because of this. I can manage without Facebook for
a few days until they fix this bug.

~~~
iyulaev
Wow, 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
This 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.

~~~
stanleydrew
And the obligatory full-context followup:

Q: People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?

A: I think judgement matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone
to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really
need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google
do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that
we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible
that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

------
ErrantX
It 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.

------
randartie
Haven'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?

------
robk
Definitely 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
well, that's because your outbound messages are on your friends's wall, not
yours.

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

~~~
drbawb
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.

~~~
bwaldrep
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>

------
dm8
Looks like FB have confirmed that these were old wall posts not the messages.
Something is confusing.

~~~
wl
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.

~~~
danielweber
This may sound snide, but you should contact TechCrunch. Offer up your proof
to them on the terms that they don't republish it.

------
kennu
So 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
Not at all, I can assure you I had my _private_ conversations disclosed.

~~~
snippyhollow
I 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...

------
radicaldreamer
The 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.

------
ohashi
That 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
They 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).

------
BasDirks
If this is true, this is the first nail in a lot of very expensive coffins.

------
zabar
True 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
wha, 10% cliff-drop isn't good enough for you?
<http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:FB>

------
conradfr
Yes 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 !

------
randartie
Old 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/facebo...](http://blog.hishamrana.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/07/facebook_new_layout1.png)

------
ctingom
I just found some of my 'messages' on a friends public wall post from 2008.
Not cool.

------
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 :|

~~~
Evbn
The 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.

------
j_s
One 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.

------
gagabity
I think its actually old private chat messages that are showing up.

------
CGamesPlay
tl;dr: This is confirmed untrue at the bottom of the article.

------
tisme
Bye-Bye Facebook.

