Facebook email glitch sends notes to strangers
Written by Dan Blacharski on March 2, 2010I have faith that readers of this blog have enough good sense not to use social networking sites to send important emails. However, some of your users may lack that good sense, and so it behooves us all to send out a common sense reminder every now and then—only use your official corporate email for anything important or sensitive! Save the Facebook email messages for updates about parties, casual observations, and idle gossip.
Wall Street Journal reporter Zach Seward got to have a glimpse of some of that idle gossip last week after Facebook made a major blunder, and some people received emails from complete strangers that were meant for somebody else. Seward gives us a glimpse of what goes on in Facebook with a few unnamed excerpts. The editor became privy to love triangles, petty jealousies, teenage parties and other truly fascinating but private missives.
The glitch was caught shortly after it started and was resolved, but not before several emails were incorrectly routed. Although there is no data being released as to how many users were affected, Facebook noted that “During our regular code push early Wednesday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time.”
There have been other security blunders in the past, including a glitch in March 2008 that made it possible to publicly view photos that had been marked as private.
A report on the Wall Street Journal details the experience of a Journal editor who received several of the errant messages. According to the report, the editor received over 100 messages, ranging from ordinary to explicit.
Facebook recently redesigned its inbox interface to make it resemble Gmail.


