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Facebook API Bug Deletes Contact Info On Phones
An anonymous reader writes "If you thought that Facebook's recent unannounced change of its users' email address tied with their account to Facebook ones was bad, you'll be livid if you check your mobile phone contacts and discover that the change has deleted the email addresses of many of your friends. According to Facebook, the glitch was due to a bug in its application-programming interface, and causes the last added email address to be pulled and added to the user's phone Contacts. The company says they are working hard at fixing the problem, but in the meantime, a lot of users have effectively lost some of the information stored on their devices."
Any fool who syncs their phone with Facebook deserves all the pain they are likely to get.
The sad part is they inflict some of this pain on innocent bystanders who they happen to have in their phone books.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The humanity.
Like most consumers are going to believe this. Of course, what right to they have to complain? FB is a free product and users willingly sign away every semblance of their privacy. Don't want to get burned? DON'T USE FB!
Facebook's programmers have made one mistake after another. I first noticed it when they started redirecting my tablet from the www. to the mobile site. Bastards. They shouldn't be forcing me to a site I don't want to use.
Then they changed my email to cpu6502@facebook.com. And now this story about the programmers erasing cellphone data "by mistake". Does Facebook hire monkeys to do their coding?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Sorry, 'bug'? Isn't that a bit like saying a behavioural 'bug' caused Facebook to kick my grandmother in the shin? (Which I don't doubt they would do if there was money in it.)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
(No really, it is)
It seems a bit disingenuous to call this a "bug."
The API was operating as designed: when a friend lists a new email address, my address book is updated to reflect it. That's normal behavior.
The "bug" in this case was Facebook's decision to modify their users' contact info without permission. The API is not to blame here.
While a lot of people (and trolls) will bash Facebook and its coders, the real issue here is the broken permissions system on Android and Iphone.
When you install an application such as Facebook, you are forced to grant more permissions than is good for you, opening up your phone for bugs like this. Those permission systems should be fixed (as well as the bug).
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I know there's some reason people continue to use Facebook. I just have a hard time imagining what it is.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Thanks for the heads-up. I promptly uninstalled the facebook app from my phone. I have way too many email addresses in my contacts that I can't afford to lose. My contacts aren't just my contacts on my phone, I use those contacts for gmail. Facebook is going to have to find a really good reason for me to care to reinstall the app.
For the first time, I appreciate your API changes which broke direct contact synchronization through the Facebook app.
Insert self-referential sig here.
That is why you do not change data under your user's control, without a) giving them a warning and ask them to opt-in and b) making backups. Any halfway competent software engineer or system administrator knows that. Apparently, Facebook does not have such people and is still half-assing it. These people are really a disgrace.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think they should demand a refund of their subscription fee.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Here's the really bizarre thing.
Of my FB using friends (eg most of them), about 80% claim to hate Facebook. Yet, they continue to use it. It's like abused-wife syndrome or something. They all go on and on about how it sucks, but they keep going back to him because maybe this time he won't hit me.
It looks to me surely like they are insane. I seem to do just fine iwthout using Facebook at all. I still have a social life, I still interact with my friends online, I still chat w/ ppl and email them, I still know what's going on.
So why the fuck do people keep using it, if they hate it so much? It seems like some weird case of otherwise smart ppl suddenly becoming dumb as rocks.
The Facebook bug here is that if you ask Facebook for someone's email, it was returning the last one added which was that stupid @facebook.com email. But why was the phone deleting contact info and replacing it? If your only source of contact data for a person was their Facebook email then yeah I can see that swapping, but why isn't the phone keeping Facebook, and other contact info separate?
My phone shouldn't see Facebook info change, then go and delete the work email from my Google contacts, or phone contact. If these phones are doing that I'd argue you have a phone SW bug. I wouldn't want any random sync service to suddenly override my manually entered contact data.
As for people complaining about work emails being swapped, why do you sync work emails via facebook? You should have that entered into a separate place. My Android phone is smart enough to keep google contacts and facebook contacts separate, and merge the accounts for display purposes. (And my old Palm Pre back in the day did an even better job of this.)
Because I like facebook's free service
Can someone explain what service that is?
Because all I've ever heard is stuff like, "I can chat w/ my friends on FB". Well, I can chat with them without FB too. Or, "I can learn where the party this w/e is gonna be". Well, I seem to learn that without FB. I've so far never seen something people claim they use FB for that doesn't work just fine if FB never even existed. I mean, jeez luise - people were going to parties and talking to family online before FB ever existed. Or, "It lets me find my highschool buds!" Which I did just fine without ever touching FB.
It's like someone suddenly sold every human being a wooden ring to place over their mouth and convinced them they couldn't talk to anyone without using this ring. So people buy these and walk around talking to people by placing the ring over their mouths, because hey, the rings let us go to parties and talk to friends and be social!one!! If you don't have one of these rings, you must be some weird antisocial weirdo who never talks to anyone! Except that people were talking to each other for the last million years without those rings and it worked fine, and plenty of don't even have a ring and seem to do everything the ring-people are doing, and without having to pay for the ring. It's completely unnecessary, but some mass insanity convinced everyone they needed it.
It makes no fucking sense.
So how is your Facebook stock doing anyway?
This is why backups are important.....
zosxavius photography
Make yourselves useful for once - go after Facebook. I, for one, will be cheering you on.
#DeleteChrome
Android Phone ----> Contacts -----> Menu -----> Import/Export ------> Export to SD Card -----> Peace of mind
zosxavius photography
I found the easiest solution is to delete my Facebook account. I've been with Facebook since invites were needed but this was the final straw. It's crazy to trust a privately traded company with ALL of my personal information but to abuse the information like this is inexcusable. If this is how they treat my personal information then I have no interest in providing them any more opportunities.
it looks to me like this might already be fixed (at least if they're rolling out in stages i got a fix update it seems) and better yet all my contacts synced from FB have their email addresses reverted back to their real addresses and not that shit @facebook.com address. maybe this "glitch" was some real damage control for that email address fiasco?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
I closed my account just before the IPO in order to protect myself from the Facebook-That-Will-Be.
Nice to know I've already dodged one bullet with my contact list.
I had this very same issue after I uninstalled the Facebook app. In 2009. No time like the present!
So how's hiring drunk coders working out for you, Mark?
Since you have access to a phone's contacts: I'm surprised you didn't skim phones for them, and add them as friends automatically.
God spoke to me
Until the version changes and you can no longer import them.
Not surprising considering their lack of a software QA team.
Nice bit of FUD there.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Since there is no official way to export, why not use your rooted android device to do just that: http://androidforums.com/android-lounge/460827-how-export-your-friends-list-facebook-must-rooted.html#post4444672 Worked great for me, though, I used SQLite Database Browser on Ubuntu which is in the standard repositories.
I uninstalled Facebook from my phone partly because it just would not stop begging me to let it see my contacts. Every update came back with an ad for how awesome syncing with Facebook was.
Maybe I should go on FB and post another status complaining about Facebook.
Love,
Mark
Well, it deletes the data after sending it all to the Facebook servers. It is my understanding that the Facebook app checks each user in the address book to see if they are FB users, so it knows whether or not to re-write the email address. In the process it seems to make sense that each user's name/email address would have to be sent to FB so server could determine whether the user has FB or not. So it looks to me like a Saagan's worth of user data (millions and millions) was grabbed in the process. While my address book is in affect an anthology, it can be copywriter as such, and FB copying my address book and putting the data on one of their servers seems like a copyright violation to me.
Changing your FB profile email address to the FB message system has the effect of quietly sending mail intended for you to the FB servers that hold their message traffic. If you are not in the habit of checking your FB message queue. That is very much like important email ending up in your junk mail folder, and you don't happen to see it. The other affect is that the email itself (which may have contained confidential information) is now sitting on the FB server and subject to being browsed by over enthusiastic admins. Not that it was ever wise to send email through their gateway to begin with. This man-in-the-middle attack, where they intercept and redirect your FB originated email will probably be found to be illegal, and I believe they did this to millions of users. Then there is the issue of the unexpected changing of the data in smartphone address books, very bad indeed.
If a billion users have to call FB at the same time to discuss what has happened to their address books, this will mean FB will have to hire a bunch of support people, at least temporarily to handle the support load. We should be thanking FB for making such a unique contribution to the US jobs situation.
I have an entry in my address book that says "Copyright (C) 2012 Douglas Goodall. All Rights Reserved.". If FB took a copy of my address book, then they are GUILTY of copyright infringement. If they make any use of this data, then they are probably "Making Available" as the Hollywood Lawyers say. Everyone should add a copyright to their address books right away. IANABCL.
I bought an HTC Amaze 4G (aka Ruby?) from Wind Mobile in Canada and it had a Facebook app on it. Which was always running. When I killed the app and the service, it would come back, restarted by HTC Sense I suppose.
The app's permissions were... everything. And I couldn't uninstall it.
I hooked it up to my computer, set to "Internet Pass-through" and ran tcpdump - no sign of "phoning home". Back to the store for a return. I called HTC and told them why.
But, after a couple more weeks of research (phoneless), I bought it again (the only phone I really liked) with the intention of rooting and removing FB app.
Before I could though, I added a contact's phone & email. They later sent me an SMS and ... the contact had a photo. WTF?!? How'd that happen?
Turns out it was the photo from that person's FB account. So the app did phone home, probably dumping all my contacts to the mothership. It certainly sent back my new contact's email and/or phone number.
I'm still considering filing a complaint with Canada's Privacy Commissioner.
Meanwhile ICS has been pushed out, so I set that app's data bandwidth cap to zero. Guess I'd better root the thing sooner rather than later.
I'm okay with this.
It was ruled that a phonebook is not copyrightable. I will let you fill in the rest.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
... sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I would maintain that a phonebook is something that is widely distributed with no effort to protect it's contents. Most likely the phonebook also does not actually contain the copyright message. In the case of my address book, I have taken steps to protect the contents. I haven't published it. I have a password on my phone and on my laptop so casual users cannot access it and learn who is in it and the details of their contact information. It's purpose is to provide the data for me, and not for the public. While IANABCL, I am thinking this may be the difference whereby it would not be the same as a phonebook.
Email deletes you!
It happened to me. I was pissed.
This is why I dislike the "move fast and break things" strategy. Sometimes, what you break causes way too much collateral damage.
While I'm not advocating that everyone needs to use the same change control as the Space Shuttle development process, a bit more forethought and a little less hacking is often called for.
Somehow nothing was affected in my Windows Phone 7 contacts list which amalgamates across: Exchange(x2), Facebook, MSN and Gmail.
I feel like I should be angry at this but it just didn't affect me.
devops agile programming, yeah. stuff like this might reenforce the need for proper QA and testing and less rapid delivery agile mumbo crap people seem to be adopting nowadays. acceptable from a start-up perhaps, not a now tradeable social media giant.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
That's it. The facebook app is off my phone. luckily HTC allows me to disable built-in apps..
Quite independently of FB being slimy and incompetent, what's up with the FB email replacing the previous entry? Why isn't the new email added to the contact as a sibling of the existing one? Is FB calling the wrong API or is the API simplistic?
Are the contacts in an open format? I don't know as I don't have an Android phone, but I've been screwed before by a failed import.
Are you sure it's not their Google profile picture too?
While I personally don't care much for the idea of having a facebook app installed on my phone (I do use facebook, but the mobile interface works just fine and can't access my contacts etc), for some people the damn thing is installed stock on the phone. In some cases I've heard it can't even be removed without rooting, though that I can't confirm.
I had an android and made the mistake to install Facebook.
It was so friendly to add my phone number to my profile within seconds. Thanks. That is one more bit of information that will never be deleted from the FB database.
My apologies to everybody in my contact list that are also registered at FB now because of my stupid action. I should have known better...
I'm so sorry :(
Privacy is terrorism.
Are you sure it's not their Google profile picture too?
When I emailed them a screen-shot of the image, she identified it as her FB profile pic.
Pretty sure she doesn't have a Google+ account, and uses HotMail as primary email - if she has gmail, I don't know it.
So, pretty sure that the unstoppable FB app is responsible.
Something missing on your phone? Just ask them to replace it. They no doubt still have it. :)
Seems strange the API gives write access to that, and who knows what else. Malicious apps will go crazy will write access to various parts of the phone.