Last night a glitch in Facebook caused a limited number of users to have their Facebook inbox exposed to other users. While a Facebook rep is quoted as saying that their engineers had diagnosed the problem and are working on it, it begs the question of why such buggy code updates got through in the first place, as they violate users’ privacy.
The bug is said to only affect a small slice of early-adopter Facebook users who also attended Harvard University. Some users started receiving Facebook notifications in their regular email inboxes that were clearly not for them. At least one person received “hundreds” of notifications (as pictured in the image above which was posted to Twitpic).
Now, it’s no secret that Facebook pushes out multiple changes regularly. Sure, bugs do occasionally slip through the cracks, but when it’s of this nature, that’s not acceptable. Facebook likes to refer to its Engineering team, but as a veteran code developer myself, it makes me wonder how much engineering QA (Quality Assurance) is being done on these changes? Code that works doesn’t suddenly not work if you have proper “test suites” in place.
In comparison with 400+ million users, the number of affected users is certainly small, but is this sort of bug acceptable in a production system, especially when privacy violations are at issue? If Facebook does publish its rumored Titan email client, will this be acceptable? Is Facebook, with only about 1,000 staff members, pushing too hard with regular changes and thus cutting corners? Where are the various Product Managers in the QA process? This isn’t the first time that Facebook has had inbox issues.
The worst part about this bug: at least a few users were locked out of their Facebook accounts while engineers look at the problem. Then again, not accessing Facebook is probably better than having your inbox exposed. See Alley Insider for more information about the Facebook bug.
I didn`t have this exact thing happen but my inbox was exposed last night and I can`t duplicate it today which is weird…I copied and pasted a Facebook msg to email as a reference for a friend. But I copied the entire thing including the names (which would be the hyperlinks) and dates from the message. When they received it they got a copy of my inbox! They got the title and first line of the last reply of each message from the page that message that I copied was on! It was really creepy. I tried to figure it out and tried it myself. I copied the same msg the same way to my yahoo email and mailed it to myself there and it didn`t show up that way–just the msg text. I mailed it to my gmail account though and there was my entire inbox!!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/katykate7/fbemail3.jpg
(there was much more obviously but I don`t care to share the whole thing
I just tried doing it again to see if it was still doing this and I can`t get it to `work` again; only the actual message comes through in the email. Perhaps this was just part of the same glitch. I had sent the original message on Tuesday evening and they received it on Wednesday night which is when the friend I sent it to told me about it and I did the test to duplicate it. As I said today it`s not doing the same thing!
Very strange.
I experienced this problem.My email messages went to people who were not in my friends list. This I discovered when a few unknown people were found responding to them!!!Felling strangely suspicious about this .I reported the matter to facebook management.Now ,I realize what had actually taken place.
I am discouraged with Facebook with all the problems lately and Farmville is having issues with not being able to retrive the gifts we are give. This is getting annoying and I am beginning to wonder if I am going to continue using either facebook or farmville. I am concerned for the safety of my privacy.
Last night my contact list was compromised. People in my list received e-mails from me but it was not me it had an attachment to it. I did not open it and contacted everyone incouraging them to delete it. I don’t know if it came from Facebook but I don’t have any other way to get into my contact list.
just saw this & wonder if that’s what has happened to my facebook. All the photos, profile, messages from friends have stopped appearing. Just a blank page. What the heck is happening?