Facebook had a bit of an error last night in that those who have their email addresses set to NOT show, actually found that Facebook had changed the privacy settings and was showing private email addresses.
It isn’t clear at the moment how it happened although a number of people spotted the problems and attempted to rehide their addresses themselves with no luck. The problem lasted around 30 minutes and then returned to normal from what we have heard.
Some believe that this could be related to some new privacy changes that are coming soon which will see your data shared with companies to better target ads. More details on TechCrunch about that.
We also read on Gawker that email addresses were also on show to people who are not your friends, as in anybody on facebook could for those 30 minutes view your email address.
To some this might not be an issue, but if someone managed to spot it quick enough they potentially could have scraped a number of details about you including your email address and thus, increasing spam to your email box etc…
We might not find out for sure what happened, but it’s a bit worrying that Facebook can potentially flick a switch and privacy is broken.
Via: GadgetLite
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