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Facebook Glitch Sends Private Messages to the Wrong Users

Facebook Glitch Sends Private Messages to the Wrong Users
Facebook just can't seem to score a win in its constant battle to protect user privacy. It's not even March yet and already in 2010, there has been a debacle involving swapped accounts on AT&T, the realization that the Facebook Developer app allowed people to track what applications their friends used, a back door handing scammers personal info, and of course, Mark Zuckerberg's infamous declaration that none of this mattered because privacy is dead. Now, as if that idea needed to be punctuated, a glitch that struck Wednesday night had messages going to everyone except the intended party.

WSJ.com editor Zach Seward found his Facebook inbox flooded with messages intended for other people. Some were mundane missives, others were tied to games like 'Farmville,' but at least a few truly private pieces of correspondence were delivered to him instead.

All told, Seward received misdirected messages from about 100 people at around 8:30 p.m. Later, his account was temporarily inaccessible, presumably while Facebook corrected the error. When he was able to log back on the messages were gone. Many users, like Seward, have Facebook messages automatically forwarded to their e-mail, where these messages are beyond Facebook's reach. If Facebook seriously intends to compete with Gmail and the like, it will have to eliminate these sorts of privacy mix-ups entirely. [From: Digits]

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Tags: e-mail, EMail, facebook, privacy, social networking, SocialNetworking, web

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