Is Facebook Sharing Your Private Messages?

While Facebook continues to expand their Timeline feature by adding back older posts to your page, many people are saying that they are now seeing private messages on their wall, and not just public posts from the past. First reported in a French newspaper, the word is out and has spread, raising the concerns of many over this potential privacy breach.
 

Private conversations from years gone by could in fact be showing up for the public to see, which for some people may be providing information that is now embarrassing or revealing details that could lead to further repercussions. Of course Facebook denies that there is a problem, stating:

A small number of users have expressed their concerns about what they mistook for private messages appearing on their 'journal' (wall)… Our engineers have studied these cases and found that these messages were actually old messages posted on the walls that were always visible on the user profiles. Facebook says that there is no interference with the privacy of users.

Even I had to question if this is indeed true, because I took a look back at the years in question, 2007-2009, and I found notes on the wall that I am almost positive were messages, not wall posts. There was nothing embarrassing or incriminating, but there were plenty of things that are not formatted like a wall post (such as having salutations and the sheer length of the posts), and messages that discussed things in far too much detail for what is usually posted on the wall. I cannot be 100% sure (maybe 90% though), as these differences could be just what a Facebook representative was referring to when stating “a lot of the confusion is because before 2008 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation.” Of course, the posts I found on my wall that I question are from 2009 and did not appear like the things anyone would post to the public wall, so I still think something is amiss.

I then bounced over to my wife’s wall and checked, and I found definite messages on there, not wall posts. There were many conversations between her and friends that were again very personal, lengthy, formatted like letters, and were probably never public posts. Again, nothing secret, but definitely not the type of posts that were public at the time.

There are plenty of others who are speaking out and coming to the same conclusion as I have, and after viewing their content, they have added comments to articles like this one. For example, user dutopies writes, “I have checked my timeline and there were definitely private messages from 2007 to 2010 sent to me by FB friends published there openly to everyone that has access to my profile. Not that I had secrets to keep, but I am 100% sure that those were no wall posts, but rather private messages. Facebook has been pushing the boundaries of privacy for years, but this is far too much of a breach in the confidence of their users.” In a related article, writer Adrian Chen concludes, “So it could be a case of some people looking back at their old embarrassing public wall posts and mistakenly assuming they must have been private messages. But maybe you were really just that lame, publicly, in 2009.”

Is it simply confusion on the part of users like me and so many others, or is there really an issue here? For me, I believe there is an issue for sure, but I am glad I have nothing of value that is being exposed that would cause me to pursue any action. I guess a good rule of thumb, when dealing with any social media network, is to make sure you never use their system for anything of real secrecy to begin with, just in case a site restructuring like this has a hiccup.

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