Let's talk about some bad PR, for a change.
In the last few days some rumors about Facebook private messages being published on users' timelines were spread online.
Users raised concerns to Facebook's staff about this phenomenon; however Facebook denied repeatedly.
They declared:
“A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages” (Taken from here).
As a Facebook user, I can say with no doubt that that some of my private messages were published as posts at the beginning of my timeline. These were private messages from a year and a few months ago - I deleted them promptly, of course.
Why is this bad PR?
I think that denying everything was a great mistake. Not only because I am sure that the rumors were true, but also because it is never good to minimise an issue that several users reported. All the users who complained have a network of friendships on Facebook (and offline), so the news spread quickly. I saw various statuses changing into warning messages for other users to read. I couldn't really give an estimate, but I believe quite a lot of Facebook users know about the leak.This is demonstrated by the fact that some users cancelled their accounts and Facebook's share price fell 9.1 per cent. As I previously highlighted here on the blog, denial is never a good PR technique in the age of social media.
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