Facebook F-up again. How can you trust this company? (opinion)

Facebook f'up

Facebook F-up again. Will the badly dressed ‘kid in the hoodie’ apologise yet again? Can you trust a company that stumbles from one disaster to another?

For once, just once, I would like to publish good news about Facebook. But the company keeps stumbling from PR distaster to PR debacle. Last week it was the money grubbing decision for Facebook test charging for ‘Subscription Groups’ that charge for exclusive content. All that will do is drive groups elsewhere.

This week Facebook has been caught sending developer’s Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email to third-party testers. The summary contains sensitive business information, including weekly average users, page views and new users.

It turns out that Facebook has been sending such sensitive information to all and sundry remotely involved in the development of a Facebook app. In this case the app testers as well as the app’s owners.

Facebook says it has now fixed the problem. Noted US site Tech Crunch obtained the email sent to app owners.

Subject line: We recently resolved an error with your weekly summary email

We wanted to let you know about a recent error where a summary e-mail from Facebook Analytics about your app was sent to testers of your app ‘[APP NAME WILL BE DYNAMICALLY INSERTED HERE]’. As you know, we send weekly summary emails to keep you up to date with some of your top-level metrics — these emails go to people you’ve identified as Admins, Analysts and Developers. You can also add Testers to your account, people designated by you to help test your apps when they’re in development.

We mistakenly sent the last weekly email summary to your Testers, in addition to the usual group of Admins, Analysts and Developers who get updates. Testers were only able to see the high-level summary information in the email and were not able to access any other account information; if they clicked “View Dashboard” they did not have access to any of your Facebook Analytics information.

We apologize for the error and have made updates to prevent this from happening again.

One this news Facebook’s share price dropped from US$197.41 to $193.96 knocking another few billion dollars off the company.

GadgetGuy’s take. No more Facebook F-up again

I won’t bore you with the litany of sins and subsequent ‘mea culpas’ the guy in the hoodie has made. It is dozens at ludicrous speed intervals over the years.

The #DeleteFacebook movement is 100% right. How can you trust a company that appears to have lost the resolve to protect its two billion users from abuse. Well the answer still is legislate and legislate hard for personal privacy. If Facebook cannot operate under such legislation so be it.

Note well. Facebook’s real mission isn’t to make you happy. It isn’t to connect you with old friends or to facilitate interesting conversations. You (the humble Facebook user) are not the customer … The people who buy your data are the real customers. Facebook’s business model is for them..