The FaceBook Bug is Baaack

 

“I can’t believe we haven’t made out either. Thanks for the call, you lush.”

I felt my body simultaneously go cold and hot at the horror of seeing this. I wanted to shut my laptop and throw it in a closet, as if hiding the object responsible for delivering this would fix things. “Things” being a private message between myself and a friend I, admittedly, drunk dialed—back in 2006, when I was but a young, stupid, and yes, drunk, college sophomore.

And there it was, for god and every one of my Facebook friends to see. Sitting on my Timeline, as if it were a public note posted to what used to be my Wall. It wasn’t the only one. Not even close.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Back in September 2012, about a year after Facebook introduced Timeline, users began reporting that responses to private messages were popping up. This means that they didn’t see their own end of the conversations, just the other person’s. Of course, it was sometimes difficult to tell: Facebook used to be a much smaller, more private place, where people would write more personal things on friends’ Walls. The Timeline gave us instant-toggle access to revisiting those times, and while some of the posts could very well have actually been posted to Walls, some of them were absolutely private.

Facebook extensively went on the defensive then, saying that inalmost all cases these were in fact old Wall posts we’d simply forgotten about—we must have been surprised at our earlier candor.But some did turn out to be private messages that had somehow found their way to a place they shouldn’t have been. [Facebook reached out to me to correct this, saying: "Every post we investigated [last year] turned out to be a wall post.”]

And apparently, this bug is back.

his article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.