Have Your Private Messages Gone Public? Privacy Concerns Raised Over Facebook

Have you noticed anything weird going down on your Facebook timeline over the past two days? Apparently there was a bit of alarm yesterday following reports that private messages had been made public on people’s Timelines. Yes, really.

The Irish Daily Mail is reporting that some Facebook users are insisting that their private messages from between the years of 2007 and 2009 are randomly appearing on their Timelines, where all their friends, family members and, in some cases, members of the public can read them. Scary or what?

Yesterday some Facebook users even went as far as deactivating their accounts, claiming that they were affected by the problem.

“A friend alerted me that messages she had sent privately years ago were now on her Timeline for everyone who was friends with her on Facebook to see. I panicked and checked my page and sure enough there were private messages I wrote posted publically on my page,” said an unnamed office worker, speaking to the paper.

“I got a real shock when I saw things I had said privately to one person viewable publically,” she added.

Have you checked your Facebook Timeline lately?

However, Facebook have directly rubbished these claims and said that they were false. The social networking website did acknowledge the issue, but insisted that there was no problem.

“A small number of users raised concerns after what they 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,” said a spokesman for the website.

“Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy,” the spokesman added.

These concerns come just as Facebook begins to remove fake accounts in order to improve the integrity of the social network. Recently the website revealed that 8.7 per cent, or 83.09million of its 955million accounts were either fake or duplicates.

Whether the claims are true or not, we’ll still be checking our Timelines, you know, just to make sure our private messages are where they’re supposed to be – safely tucked away in our inboxes instead of plastered all over our walls.