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Last night Facebook experienced a hiccup during an update to the site’s code that publicly exposed members’ private e-mail addresses.
The privacy blunder was first discovered by Gawker — which estimates that e-mail addresses were exposed for 30 minutes late Tuesday night — and has been confirmed by Facebook.
A representative from Facebook explained the glitch in the following statement sent to us via e-mail:
“Last night during Facebook’s regular code push, a bug caused hidden e-mail addresses to be visible briefly. The bug was detected within minutes and corrected.”
While bugs are to be expected from startups, glitches occurring within such a massive site are off-putting. Facebook has a responsibility to maintain user privacy, especially now that there are more than 400 million members who trust the site with personally identifiable information like e-mail addresses (which we hand over as soon as we sign up).
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Facebook has new privacy alterations coming up, but this doesn't appear to be part of it... or? read more:
Facebook announced that it was once again making changes to its privacy policy. One of the biggest changes that Facebook is making involves applications and third-party websites. We’ve been hearing whispers from multiple sources about these changes, and the announcement all but confirms what Facebook is planning to do. In short, it sounds like Facebook is going to be automatically opting users into a reduced form of Facebook Connect on certain third party sites — a bold change that may well unnerve users, at least at first. Here’s how Facebook is describing the change in its blog post:
Today, when you use applications such as games on Facebook.com or choose to connect to Facebook on sites across the web, you are able to find and interact with your friends. These applications require a small set of basic information about you in order to provide a relevant experience. After feedback from many of you, we announced in August that we were moving toward a model that gives you clearer controls over what data is shared with applications and websites when you choose to use them.
In the proposed privacy policy, we’ve also explained the possibility of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group of partners and we would also offer new controls.