On Wednesday, users found a gate-way to their Facebook friends private chat conversations. Facebook closed the gate-way, hole. This new glitch heightened feelings of mistrust for the service to safe-guard personal information.
“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” explained Elliot Schrage, company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.” Readers can submit questions for Mr. Schrage on Bits, The Times’ technology blog.
This latest glitch puts Facebook in the middle of talks about the use of personal information by web sites. “While this breach appears to be relatively small, it’s inopportunely timed,” declared Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It threatens to undermine what Facebook hopes to achieve with its network over the next few years, because users have to ask whether it is a platform worthy of their trust.”