You may have noticed this past Wednesday morning that when you went to Facebook that the chat feature was not available.
But did you know why? Well, a recent software release to the constantly evolving site contained a glitch.
Logged in users, for a brief time, were able to access chat transcripts from their friends private chats with other people.
To be clear, people could see chats that they were not involved in, as long as one of their friends participated in the chat.
Recognizing the serious privacy-issues with this glitch, Facebook took the feature down until the fix could be deployed.
While you can Google (sorry, Google or Bing) the phrase "Facebook privacy glitch" and read all about it, I thought it was interesting to point out a few lessons in our industry of which this event reminds us.
I will start with a specific one and get broader with the next two items.
- Facebook, a site that I am practically addicted to, can be dangerous.
Stories are everywhere of job candidates losing positions after companies check their Facebook pages.
People know more and more information about each other than ever before, and each person on Facebook is cultivating a much broader window into their personal lives than ever before.
You should keep this in mind as your online presence grows.
- There is no such thing as complete privacy on connected systems. It's why secret government computer work is done on systems that are not network-connected and have no disk drives.
That way information on the machine can never be seen without sitting in the chair at the workstation.
The point is that if you are doing something on the internet, someone somewhere it is tracking it -- even if only your internet service provider.
Your company can easily see every IM and email you send and receive.
- Software is never bug-free. Even Microsoft Office, browsers, and operating systems have bugs -- that's what service packs are, bug fixes.
Even if you are working on your own systems at a giant company like Facebook, bugs pop into production code.
Organizations and people that quickly react to issues, provide professional support, and stand behind their work are more important within our industry than empty claims of writing "software with no errors."
It was an interesting development, one that has many people thinking about privacy and the power of Facebook, this author included.