Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Saturday 12 January 2008, 7:21 PM
UPDATE: Facebook closes privacy hole
Well whaddya know. Earlier today I posted about my discovery that users of Facebook's mobile version could see all of their friends' email addresses that had been used to set up their Facebook accounts.
At the end of a long afternoon's West End browsing (is there ever anything decent in the sales?), I killed some time on the bus by logging into Facebook. And guess what? That "contacts" button (option 4 on the bottom menu on the Facebook mobile home page) had vanished!
Now, I have a small confession to make. I actually noticed this interesting feature a month or two ago but, being lazy and flighty, I didn't give it too much thought at the time. It was only this morning, when I tried cross-referencing those email addresses with my friends' profiles, that I discovered some were not meant to be shown, and some were not the email addresses that my friends had opted in to show.
All of which means, this feature has been around for a fair while but no-one's really picked up on its implications until now, or at least they haven't publicised them on a main-stream-non-main-stream-media (Is this right? Ed.) site like this one until now. And I find it incredibly hard to believe that no-one at Facebook thought about it before now.
What I want to know is this: why was the "contacts" feature there at all? It came two options after a "friends" feature, which is more what you would expect it to be, and would therefore appear to be redundant. It presented a major privacy flaw, yet it wasn't exactly buried - it's not like I found some clever hack to find those email addresses.
I'm confuddled. And I will try my hardest to find the explanation when I get back to work on Monday...
PreviousComments on this post
Man you got a bat up your ass about facebook or what! Im not really a fan of the site, but you sound like someone just LOOKING for something to complain about. OK , so you made a good point about the lack of privacy, but now your complaining that they took to long. )
Did it ever cross your mind that a company , any company, might be soooo damn busy doing a million things they they really never actually noticed it until it was pointed out to them?
What a boring read this was. In fact a better article would have been to examine how amazing it is that within the same day some complainer on a website bitched about this, they reacted positively and made the change.
As much as i cant stand facebook i have to applaud them for reacting to the complaints and opinions of their users time and time again... and lighting fast! How the hell did they do that?
I develop sites and some of the simplest little changes have taken my developers way too long to change, not to mention all the other problems in the sites that we dont even notice until a user points them out.
People like you who complain about every little thing in the world, and love to sit behind their desks pointing out everything that someone does wrong are simply annoying.
One last item. If this issue is sooo important to people, then why did it take you so long to point it out? This issue was about the privacy of a ton of people, and I think the REAL question here is why you didnt care about it before, but care about it enough to write on it now?
-dan
This comment has been deleted at the users request
I have no particular issue with Facebook. I actually quite like Facebook. I use it regularly. And yes, they do respond quickly when an issue is publicised. What I find curious about this issue is that it was openly there for all to see, but no-one has yet commented on the implications. When someone does, the feature gets disabled. The point is that Facebook had to have known about the implications when the feature was designed. I find this interesting.
And true to form, the "contacts" function has now been reinstated, but without showing email addresses (it's now a bit like the "all friends" function). So, bravo Facebook. Privacy is restored.
