Facebook Apologizes For 'Year In Review' Photos

Facebook this year showed users a compilation of photos drawn from their own gallery of uploaded images, but the automatic nature of the collation and display of those photos inspired the need for an apology on Facebook's part to at least one reader who was upset by the compiled pictures. That may sound silly, but even innocent data-mashing can touch real nerves. "Eric Meyer, a web design consultant and writer, is one of those people. Earlier this year, he lost his daughter to brain cancer on her sixth birthday. For that reason, Meyer wrote in a blog post, he had actively avoided looking at previews of his own automatically generated summary post. But Facebook put a personalized prompt advertising the feature in his newsfeed, he wrote, prominently featuring the face of his dead daughter -- surrounded by what appears to be clip art figures having a party."

Comments

He didn't care enough to edit it, apparently

[IANAAC]

Did he not know that he could choose the background image? Or that he could edit it? It came out the way it did because he just clicked away without thinking.

Sorry for his daughter's death, but he could have influenced the final result or, better yet, elected to not participate in it at all.