Facebook has admitted that the company has been secretly deleting the messages sent in Messenger by its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "After the Sony Pictures emails were hacked in 2014, we made a series of changes to protect the communications of our executives," says a Facebook spokesperson in a statement TechCrunch . "These include limiting the retention period for Mark's messages in Messenger, which we did in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages."
The old Facebook messages sent by Zuckerberg simply disappeared into some existing threads, and TechCrunch reports that the affected messages no longer appear in the Facebook download their reporting tool According to reports, recent messages of Zuckerberg remain in the inboxes of some users, and the company does not seem to have deleted all previous messages from Zuckerberg before 2014. Facebook has never publicly disclosed the removal of these messages until now, and simply erased them silently. of the recipient's Messenger inboxes. Regular Facebook users can not delete their own messages from other people's Messenger inbox, and a special process was applied to Facebook executives.
Deleting Mark's messages while leaving recipients intact highlights Facebook's real opinions about privacy better than any claim he makes about the subject
– Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) April 6, 2018
Facebook's own terms of service do not cover the removal of content from company accounts unless it violates community standards, so Facebook shares they look bleak as a result. The actions could be seen as an attempt to eliminate potentially embarrassing messages, and this is particularly relevant given the history of Facebook. Zuckerberg called people "dumb" for trusting him from the beginning of Facebook, and allegedly pirated a Facebook user's private account in 2004.
This latest revelation comes at a time of heightened scrutiny on privacy policies of Facebook and data protection. Facebook revealed earlier this week that Cambridge Analytica obtained data of up to 87 million people, mainly in the US. UU Facebook is implementing some extensive platform changes to prevent this from happening in the future, and the company is looking for a "suspicious activity" from the developers to fully audit them after they made similar changes in 2014 apparently without an audit. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will now testify before Congress next week to answer questions about the use of his company and the protection of user data.
Zuckerberg also revealed this week that "malicious actors" have been scraping phone numbers and email addresses from Facebook accounts, and Facebook's technology director told the Financial Times that the company has shifted its focus to the threats of hackers. "We will continue to launch new products, but before launching them we sit down and try to think of all the possible misuses of them and what the bad actors could do with them, and how we mitigate those things," says CTO of Facebook. Mike Schroepfer.
Facebook is also reducing its Android call history and SMS data collection, after some users were alarmed to discover years of phone records and SMS communications in their accounts. Facebook has been using what it calls an "acceptance feature" to improve its friend recommendation algorithm when requesting access to contacts, SMS data and call history on Android phones. Facebook is now reducing the amount of data it collects and deleting previous call records.
