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Info about the “ALL MY PERSONAL EMAILS ARE ON MY TIMELINE” posts that are currently doing the rounds on Facebook…

Seems it’s just another hoax/panic. (This time.)

UPDATE: It now seems that while many people aren’t affected by this issue, enough evidence is coming through now to say that it’s a real issue. See this site for details, and for how to fix if your Facebook timeline is one of the ones affected.

I’ll leave the remainder of my post below intact for the info on how to more generally secure your social media accounts.

I had a look back through my timeline and at first thought “oh crap, this one’s real!” But once I started looking through the wall posts and comparing to my private messages, I saw that nothing from my private messages was actually on my timeline.

Of course, as the saying goes “the plural of anecdote isn’t ‘data'” – so it of course follows that the singular of anecdote is even less so. 🙂 The article linked above has some more info about people who continue to insist that they’ve seen valid instances of private emails/messages showing up on their timeline. Facebook have countered that the wall post and private messaging systems actually run on completely different platforms, so crosstalk between them would require some pretty spectacular code gymnastics to occur.

(continue reading…)