According to Huffington Post’s, Joshua Slayen, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may be the reason to blame for their own privacy scare. Last week there were numerous reports that Facebook published private messages from many years before. According to the social media giant, that wasn’t true.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has thoroughly investigated the rumor and reported that it wasn’t true, so how did the report come out otherwise? Apparently, the report started in late September, when some of the website’s users noticed that there were “private” messages from their friends on their Timeline wall. Interestingly enough, these messages were from 2009.
Josh Costine, a Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) specialist for TechCrunch, dug up some information. He discovered that email receipts show what appears to be exposed messages were only wall posts. They didn’t appear inside the user’s message box.
A representative for Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) confirmed to Costine, ” 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.]”
Most Internet users already know that privacy is not something easy to come by on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, but there is still a small level of it, that we take for granted. Nobody wants to wake up one morning and discover that some of their most private conversations from years ago have been displayed for everyone to see. Facebook users know that most everything they post, including messages, images, likes, and links, will be displayed publicly for everyone to see. Since Facebook still offers the option of private messages, users who take advantage of this feature often expect that feature to stay the way it was meant to be: private.
