AmirWatad.com

Should You Trust Facebook?

I just received an email from Facebook saying:

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

[A link to facebook]

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

At first glance, this looks like spam, or phishing.

Spam from facebook

(Click the above image for a larger version).

Note that the sender email is: root+oord=rze@facebookmail.com, The username looks strange, and the domain is facebookmail not facebook. Looks like phishing. Is it?

Of course I didn’t touch the link in this mail (which is a real link to facebook), and just took a screenshot in order to write a post and warn people to be careful.

Surprisingly, when I logged in to my facebook account. I just saw the same notification:

facebook spam

(Click the above image for a larger version)

What? How? Why?

So it’s really facebook!

Why didn’t they lose my other settings? Do they have different databases for each type of settings? Will they lose my bookmarks? I know people who have lots of albums in facebook, will they lose their photos as well?

I expected from a company like facebook to give a better explanation than “Unfortunately”, this is unacceptable.

And this not the end, guess what?

A quick search in Google shows that I’m not the first, other people had a similar experience with facebook:

25, Nov this year: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/11/dear-facebook-you-lost-my-what.html

26, Nov this year: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/26/facebook_email/

Earlier today: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=20531316728&topic=7961

Google and you’ll see many many others.

The question is: Couldn’t facebook fix the “problem” in 26,Nov when it first “happened” (It’s the earliest date I could find this problem reported in)? How could this happen for so much people?

Why did facebook decide to use a so strange mail address?

All are open questions that facebook will have to address.

One other thing: Just to be sure that it’s really facebook, I ran a whois query on facebookmail.com and it really belongs to facebook.

facebookmail whois

(Click the above image for a larger version).

Conculsion: It’s no doubt on of two alternatives:

1. Facebook are liars: Never trust them, never give them your credit card # or any personal information. They may missuse it.

OR

2. Facebook are so irresponsible: Never expect them to keep your data, never be surprised if you lose all your friend/photos/bookmarks/etc..

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Tags: Social Media, Websites