Today in TechDon’t Panic: Your Facebook private messages are safe and sound
If you've seen the myriad of reports appearing on social networks and tech sites regarding old Facebook private messages suddenly appearing on users' Timelines, you can breathe a sigh of relief: Facebook has confirmed that no private messages have been publicly posted on anyone's pages.
The first widespread reports began circulating a number of hours ago, with users claiming that old private message were inexplicably appearing on their Timeline. It seems that the antiquated messages that some users are noticing are actually just posts that appeared on the old Facebook "Wall" system. As the new Timeline layout is an evolution of the Wall system — and those older posts carried over to the Timeline as well — these messages have always been there, but some users are just now noticing.
The confusion stems from the fact that when Facebook still used Walls for users, people would often have Wall-to-Wall conversations, though these differ from private messages in that Wall posts were available to view by anyone visiting a user's page. The social network assures us that private conversations are still private, and we've obtained an official statement on the issue that reads as follows: "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."
This article was written by Mike Wehner and originally appeared on Tecca
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