Wed May 5, 6:30 PM

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Private chats between some Facebook users were briefly viewable by other users on Wednesday, an embarrassing technical glitch for a company facing growing criticism over "sloppy" privacy protection.

Techcrunch, a blog, first reported a bug related to a feature on the fast-growing social network site that allows a user to see how their profile will appear to other users.

By manipulating the "preview my profile" feature, Facebook said people were able to view their friends' private chat messages and pending friend requests for a limited amount of time on Wednesday.

"We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook's privacy slip-up underscores the need for greater scrutiny of the company.

"Our view is that the FTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) needs to act on consumer concerns about Facebook's sloppy privacy and security practices," Rotenberg said.

Facebook's instant messaging service was disabled while engineers fixed the bug. The problem was resolved by Wednesday afternoon, Facebook said.

The snafu is embarrassing to Facebook, the world's No.1 Internet social network with 400 million users, as it comes under increasing scrutiny from privacy advocates.

Facebook changed the way users' personal profile information is treated last month. It now requires that data about an individual's hometown, education and hobbies be tied to public pages devoted to those topics.

Four U.S. senators wrote to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg last week taking issue with some of the changes.

Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, in which users share information with friends and other contacts, have become enormously popular.

Internet search giant Google Inc spurred a privacy controversy in February when it launched a new social media service dubbed Buzz.

The service initially used an individual's email contacts from Google Gmail to build a social network of Buzz contacts that the rest of the world could see. Google acted quickly to change the settings so that contacts were kept private by default.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)


http://ca.news.yahoo.com/...book_snafu

Lately I've finding more and more reasons to disable my facebook page and this one is taking the cake.

Bottom line: Don't put anything on Facebook that you wouldn't put on a billboard.

I've deleted all my personal information and stopped accepting friendships that I don't initiate (unless it's someone I know well). Facebook isn't private.

Genesia said:

Not as private as some think it is.

we live in a world where people walk around in public talking on their cell phone having intimate and private conversations at the top of their lungs....

people get naked at the drop of a dime and throw their pics on the internet.

I'm betting people with true privacy issues were well protected, and a bunch of teenage girls got their feelings hurt when they read their BFF secretly hates them and is trying to take their boyfriend. I'm sure they then texted said boyfriend a nekkid pic.

Facebook isn't private, just like MySpace and Twitter ain't private.

That's scary.

I was using chat on facebook a few days ago and thought 'if anyone else could see this, i'm in big trouble'.

i've never used to chat function, i leave it off.

BklynBabe said:

i've got a dime if you want it.

florescent said:

I'm thinking the same thing


"Hmmm did I talk to her on Wednesday? think, think think...."