facebook

facebook

When it comes to relationships, no one wants to look like the fool who gets played over and over again by the same person.  How many times can you go back to your ex before you realize that it’s never going to work?  Do your friends refuse to spend time with you until after you’ve broken it off with that person – finally?  What if I told you that you are doing the same thing with Facebook?  Sure, they’ve admitted to wrong-doing by leaking all your personal information.  You’ve taken them back and ultimately forgiven them.  And, like many failed relationships they keep messing up.  Why am I comparing Facebook to a bad relationship?  Well, it’s being reported that they’ve done it again.

A developer reported that someone outside of the company had received their Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email.  While that in itself might not be overly strange, the email summary contained confidential business information.  The worst part?  Well, one of the bad parts to it is that it took Facebook 43 hours before confirming that they had sent company analytics to outsiders.  Remember how I said that it was the worst part?  Well, that’s not completely true. In fact, it wasn’t just from a single app.

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Facebook has said that roughly 3% of all the apps on Facebook Analytics had their weekly summary information leaked to testers instead of just developers and analysts.  Because testers are usually people outside of the company itself, developers are worried what kind of information was going out.  Facebook, of course, is reassuring everyone that no personally identifiable information or contact information was improperly disclosed.  They also plan to notify all impacted developers about the leak.

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So how do we feel about this?  On one hand, it does feel innocent, but on the other hand, its another incident in a long line of incidents.  How do we know that this won’t continue to happen?  Facebook admits:

“Due to an error in our email delivery system, weekly business performance summaries we send to developers about their account were also sent to a small group of those developer’s app testers.”

Facebook has continually promised the public and lawmakers that they’re going to strengthen privacy controls.  And yet, we continue to see privacy disasters. There is a tiny part of me that wants to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, I’m also struggling.  While I’d like to say that this is the last apology that we will see, I’m not convinced that it will.  Not only that, but let’s go back to the bad relationship for a moment.  If you end up taking that person back, and their behavior changes or improves, it shows that they’re taking the situation seriously and legitimately want to be a better person.

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In either case, I’m not saying that who you’re dating is horrible and shouldn’t be given a second chance.  I’m also not saying that about Facebook.  But what we have to take into consideration is that Facebook hasn’t changed.  They haven’t improved their privacy measures.  We know that – not just from this incident, but from their own admission.  Data is still getting leaked, unfortunately.  If it wasn’t apparent before, I think its time for #DeleteFacebook for good.  Don’t you?

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