Yesterday I posted an article on here which suggested Facebook or Google had accidentally “leaked” user emails, through Facebook’s opt-out system. The logic we used at the time to deduce this was completely off. The reality was that the users had placed the original opt-out emails that they had been sent within public forums. In other words, it was user error that led to emails being exposed.
Points Of Clarification
- Google does not use links found in your Gmail to crawl websites – Google has clarified that they never crawl links found through your Gmail account. This conspiracy theory assertion that I submitted was off base.
- Facebook and Google no longer expose the page – As I explained in the previous article, the Facebook page that was being indexed (o.php), probably shouldn’t have been. As such Google (and other search engines), have pulled those pages from their index and Facebook has added o.php to their Robots.txt file. If you don’t understand the technical aspect of this, don’t worry.
- Facebook’s Friend Finder is safe – We came to the conclusion yesterday that the only source of the problem could be Facebook’s friend finder. It actually wasn’t, so you can feel comfortable using the Friend Finder feature moving forward.
Since the article was so off base, we decided to pull it all together. While the logic we used was a round-about logic, we weren’t the only ones confused. However rather than updating a post which has practically become useless, we’ve pulled it all together.
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
This had nothing to do with Google at all, and yet you continue to highlight Google. Yahoo, Bing, Ask… all of these indexed the same information. Stop highlighting Google in this.
Comment by dee — June 4, 2010 @ 7:04 am
Thank you for being honest and forthright about your mistake.
Comment by Sean Turvey — June 4, 2010 @ 7:46 am
Kudos to you for taking this first step. Now, step two is to Google "Facebook Loophole Exposes Thousands Of Email Addresses" and notice how prolific the original information has spread across the Net. Step three: Because so many of these pages republished a paragraph and a link, redirect the original URL that is now gone to this new page. Step four: Follow those Google links and contact each site that republished the original article in its entirety and have not updated (such as The Register), and, in the meantime, post in their comments an update.
Comment by Rick — June 4, 2010 @ 8:17 am
A robots.txt file exclusion for o.php won't prevent anyone from indexing o.php
If the page shouldn't be indexed it needs more stringent security.
Comment by dg — June 4, 2010 @ 9:23 am
I don't know if this makes sense, but because of security concerns, I deactivated my Facebook account on May 20 and received a confirming email from Facebook. Yet over the past 2 days, my email account was hacked and friends and family have reported that someone is phishing using my deactivated Facebook account and my email account. I have since restored my email account with a stronger password, but don't understand how someone gained access to my deactivated Facebook details.
Comment by HH — June 5, 2010 @ 5:18 am