As Facebook users continue to come forward and say private messages sent between 2007 and 2008 have popped up publicly on their Timeline pages, the social network is standing by its claims that no messages have been leaked.
“We have reviewed reports from all over the world and have yet to find one instance where this has been true,” Fred Wolens of Facebook Policy Communications told Mashable. “Moreover, it would be incredibly difficult from a technical perspective for this even to be possible because of the systems’ architecture with two separate systems running on two separate languages.”
Earlier this week, Facebook users panicked over rumors that private messages were showing up publicly on Timeline. Mashable received a flurry of emails and tweets from users who thought messages they never wrote publicly have surfaced on their Timelines. Even some of our staffers said the same thing.
But Facebook debunked those claims, saying these messages are actually just older wall posts.
“A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline,” Wolens said. “Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.”
Wolens said the discrepancy comes from a wider rollout of the newer Timeline layout on a global scale. He noted that if a user can comment or Like that activity, it is a wall post and not a private message. In the past, users weren’t able to comment on and Like posts, so Facebook believes members new to Timeline are confusing old posts for private messages.
“We’re happy to review reports, but we have finished our internal investigation and are satisfied that no private messages have been leaked,” Wolens said.
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