Facebook Retracted Zuckerberg's Messages From Recipients' Inboxes (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: You can't remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspiculously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook's Download Your Information tool. Casey Newton, a reporter at The Verge, tweeted, "Deleting Mark's messages while leaving the recipients' intact highlights Facebook's actual views on privacy better than any statement it makes on the subject ever will"

Update: Facebook has just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.

Comments

Stop using Facebook

[hazardPPP]

If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011). It's not like you have a subscription you paid for the year and now have to use up to get your money's worth or something. Just log off. Delete your account. Say no.

You can live without Facebook. It's not necessary. If they change their ways, you can always go back. Nothing will get Facebook to change the way they operate like losing millions of users really quickly. If users just bitch about, but keep using it, nothing substantial will change. If people start leaving in droves, then they will change things.

Re: Stop using Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

my hero for quitting FB so long ago. the smartest people never used it in the first place (or my space or friendster for that matter).

it's such a privacy nightmare I don't understand how anyone would choose to.

Re:Stop using Facebook

[hazardPPP]

Privacy is an illusion.

Its what we tell ourselves to protect us from what other people might think about us. With enough effort, anyone can gather just about any information about you that they want. Hire a PI and have them follow you around for long enough, and they will tell you things about yourself that in some cases you are unaware of.

Once you realize that privacy is an illusion, then you'll be much happier about your life. Playing pretend is a child's game.

Likewise, most people don't care about much of what you do behind closed doors. Sure there are exceptions, but I can tell you that most ./ers don't give a shit about what's growing in my back yard.

I'm afraid you've drunk the Zuckerbeg Kool-Aid.

Yes, absolute privacy is an illusion. Unless of course you are willing to live as a hermit completely isolated from society. People, of course, at least intuitively, know this. Relative privacy on the other hand, is not an illusion at all - it's a real thing. It's about what we decide to tell or reveal about ourselves to different classes of people. This is a fundamental pillar of social relations. Some things, I tell to no one (although it's conceivable that people could find out about them if they really tried). Some things, I will tell my wife, but not my co-workers...some to my friends, but not my wife...and so on. Of course, those different sets of people could talk to each other and destroy my perception of relative privacy. Which is where we get to another thing: trust.

The whole uproar about privacy in the modern era and its impact by modern technologies is really about two things. The first is exposure. With these new technologies, the vast majority of people have no idea how exposed they are to the world when they are using certain services, and very few of those service providers communicate that in a clear way. It's hard to intuitively understand, because what is done to your data is very opaque to you as a user. The average person will make the connection between using a free service (Free-to-air TV channels, Gmail, Facebook) and being shown ads while they use it: OK, they will say, by serving up advertising they make money since I don't pay them directly. However, the average person will not make the connection between the ads and data gathering (now they might of course after all the news on it, but at the beginning of such services years ago, they would not have). If I read a book (a paper copy), and do not talk about it, no one knows I read it. If I buy a newspaper, nobody knows if I've read the sports section or the cooking section. If I read an article on my phone, tons of apps might be tracking me and seeing what I've read. If I talk to a friend in a cafe, I know that besides my friend, what I said was perhaps overhead by a few people around me. If I chat to that friend over Facebook, Facebook knows the entire content of that conversation...and who know who else as well.

People need to know about this, because if they don't, they will be unwittingly exposed. This can go from the party-pooping (I'm buying a surprise gift for my wife, we share computers, then before her birthday Google and Facebook ads spam her for the exact thing I bought - no longer a surprise) to the life-destroying (I have a fight with my wife, think of divorce, google it up but then forget about it - then at maybe a very bad time, she realizes I was doing this via some Google Ad or whatever, and things get worse). That doesn't mean we should limit people's exposure at all times. It means people have a right to know what exposes them - so that they can choose what and when to expose to whom - to protect their relative privacy.

The second issue is trust. If I say something to a friend, I have some expectations about whether he will share this information, and with whom: I have a certain level of trust in him regarding the protection of my (relative) privacy. With Facebook and the like, the level of trust you

Re:Their servers, their service

[nospam007]

"I also have my own servers, and I can also delete whatever I want from them."

Exactly! You're an asshole, they're assholes, no difference.

Don't add an unsend option

[mysidia]

Facebook should just admit that the execs of the company have that and more powers and the
ability to exercise more actions than mere mortals when it comes to messaging tools and access
to data on the website, because clearly they do.

Unfortunately they don't yet have control of users' e-mail accounts, so they can't yet delete receipts or E-mail based proofs,
although they might in the future tweak the feature that sends messages to E-mail accounts to prevent it from being used to
prove a message was sent.

just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.

That's bullshit. Once you send a message and someone's read it;
what to do with the copy of the message within their Inbox should be their decision.

I could think of dozens of different scenarios where I would want to keep a message against the sender's
desires, such as evidence of wrongdoing, OR evidence to protect me (E.g. Proof they directed me to do X), and they should have no say in that.

Re:Their servers, their service

[edtice1559]

Removing it from certain people's inboxes would not be destruction of evidence as long as Facebook still has the records. Now it's harder to get that evidence (need a subpoena that can be fought), but just adding a visibility flag to the data does not destroy any evidence. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm anal.