Facebook employees opened a privately shared Google Sheet

reddit.com

35 pointsdredmorbius4 comments

This is a non-story. If you've ever sent a link via Google Chat you would have witnessed the same behavior-before the link is delivered it will often be loaded by a google crawler who will check it for malicious content. I'm sure Facebook does the same thing.

Wanted to chime in and share Skype does the same. Spin up a web server and paste a link into chat.

I'm not sure why this ended up on the HN frontpage. This seems like a fairly unremarkable event.

Obviously anything posted through Facebook could potentially be seen by some Facebook employee/bot at some level, right? This is expected - otherwise the likes of Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Matrix wouldn't be a thing.

It's only unremarkable in the sense that we know in the abstract that FB can look at our stuff. This makes it concrete. That's very important as it breaks the mental model users have of Facebook, that messanger is in some sense private. Events like these can drive the point home that that is not correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com