Facebook Accidently Reveals Private Email Addresses

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Uh Oh, Facebook may have yet another privacy-related debacle on its hands. According to a flurry of Facebook status updates and posts on Twitter, Facebook may have accidentally revealed the full email addresses of private profiles.  The brief incident reportedly occurred late Tuesday night and lasted for approximately 30 minutes.

During that brief window of time, some, and maybe all, private Facebook accounts were made visible to the public and anyone visiting Facebook could view the email address associated with those accounts. Details are sparse, so we have no idea how it happened, why it happened, and to how many people it happened.

Such stumblings are nothing new as Facebook has struggled over the past few years while it tries to strike a balance between privacy and expansion. These growing pains are part of its transformation from a small, localized social network to the largest social network in the world, one with a repository of information that makes advertisers drool and a potential for monetization that is staggering. As its tries to broaden its reach and subsequently increase its value, Facebook has gradually made changes to its privacy policy in order to open up its social network to the public and coax its users to share information outside of their close circle of friends.It is a delicate balance that Facebook has often upset.

The latest such change to Facebook’s privacy policy was announced on March 26th and will make some some big changes to Facebook Connect, a service which allows Facebook users to use their Facebook login credentials on third party websites. The newly announced  privacy policy would allow select, pre0approved third party websites to peek into your Facebook cookie without prior authorization as a means of identifying you so they can serve up personalized content. This new Facebook Connect feature would operate under the “opt-out” model so all users would automatically be enrolled into this feature.

Though not confirmed, this email glitch may have occurred as a mistaken side effect of Facebook’s implementation of these Facebook Connect changes. Regardless of its origination, the glitch is yet another black mark on Facebook and should make people pause and think about the personal details they share on any social network. Anyone that has an opinion on Facebook and/or this current privacy flub can share their thoughts in the comments.