Facebook
has admitted that it's been covertly meddling with users'
inboxes to delete older messages sent by the social
network's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg
The
company cited “corporate security” as its reasoning for the
move, but Zuckerberg may have also been seeking to prevent more
embarrassing leaks of his private conversations.
Like
his instant messages from 2010, in which a 19-year-old Zuck
called early Facebook users “dumb f***s” for trusting him with
their data.
The
revelations, detailed in a new TechCrunch report, come just days
before Zuckerberg’s scheduled appearances in front of Congress
on April 10 and 11 over his platform’s privacy scandal – which
saw Cambridge Analytica nab the data of 50million users without
their permission.
Old
messages sent by Zuck have entirely vanished in some existing
conversation threads, and the chats reportedly don’t even appear
in Facebook’s “download your information”‘ tool (a file that
contains all your Facebook activity).
The
impacted accounts reportedly belong to both former employees and
non-employees of the social network.
TechCrunch
claims it reviewed an email receipt of a Facebook chat from Zuck
dating back to 2010 that proves the message has since
disappeared.
The
company cited “corporate security” in the wake of the Sony
Pictures hack, which saw the film studio’s movies and internal
emails leaked online, as its reasoning for the move.
“After
Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of
changes to protect our executives’ communications,” said a
Facebook spokesperson in a statement.
“These
included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in
Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal
obligations to preserve messages.”
As
TechCrunch’s Josh Constine points out, the covert move goes
against Facebook’s terms of service, which states that it can
only remove content from users’ accounts if it violates the
platform’s community standards.
The
unsend feature isn’t available to regular users, who can only
delete messages from their own inbox, not from the inbox of
users they’ve chatted with.
The
timing of the report couldn’t be worse for the beleaguered web
giant.
Just
yesterday Facebook admitted for the first time that it scans
users’ Messenger conversations in a bid to police its app and
remove content that infringes guidelines.
To
make matters worse, Zuck revealed this week that the platform’s
search feature may have allowed “malicious actors” to hoover up
the the public info of everyone on the site (that’s a whopping
2.2 billion users in case you were wondering).
We’ve
asked Facebook for more clarification on its latest privacy
gaffe.
We
asked the company the following questions. Can you detail all
the instances when the message scrubbing took place? Did you
notify the affected users of the practice? If not, why did you
decide to do it covertly?
Do
you think Facebook is meddling with your messages? Vent in the
comments.