Hacker News Reader

Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone point to a Facebook representative saying that rollback is impossible? (I don't care at all what the CNET author says.) It seems like they should just put everything back to the email address they had before it was auto-updated to @ facebook.com. Then their apps would put them back to what they were on people's phones.

Lastly, if they were truly going to fix the problem, they would pump through all the emails they got a chance to spy on, this time to the correct address, maybe with an attachment or sending the email as an attachment with their official apology.

Can't rollback the delay and that impacts a lot, but email is theoretically unreliable anyway. Hurry up guys and gals... show me someone at Facebook actually cares about the product (their users) they are selling to their customers (their advertisers).

View on HN

A couple issues pop to mind. My understanding was that this update took a week(+?) to roll out and may still be in progress. It could take them awhile to even start to roll back. Then if you do roll back what do you do about all the people that have changed their settings in the meantime? They have updated their email addresses, perhaps with different ones, so do those get over-written with the old data in all cases? I'm sure it could be figured out but how timely it would be is questionable... not to mention that FB may still be trying to salvage the bump in use for @Facebook.com they were aiming for in the beginning.

I agree it's not a simple fix. Since they have everything stored, they could act as though the address had never been changed. (Primary email should be most recent non-auto-change. Email should be sent to value of primary email address [without auto-change] as configured when email arrived.)

This mistake/bug/zuck-style enhancement has had a colossal negative impact on many people. If Facebook tries to salvage anything from it then it's even more clearly time to walk away. I am not cheerleading for Facebook at all on this, I just want people's contacts back to normal and their emails delivered to where they want them. I think we agree this is possible, in fairly direct contradiction to the title of this article.

There's no reason to assume that the old addresses in people's address books were the same ones Facebook had as primaries. If my co-worker was in my phone as tom@patientslikeme.com, but signed up for Facebook as tom@gmail.com, and Facebook tries to roll back? Data loss still, and possibly even a privacy leak.

I was basing this on the fact that the facebook app/sync would have pushed tom@gmail.com into the contact info in the same way that it is now in trouble for overwriting with @facebook.com.

Thanks for bringing this up as it would not work if they only push changes, and no change had been made facebook-side prior to the 'bug'. In that case, they should only rollback those that had been pushed out and the majority of email addresses would be lost. However, since users can go into the settings and restore their primary email address, it seems like it would be best for Facebook to encourage them to do so in the same way they've nagged me to switch to timeline forever.

It's a metaphor. She's saying they can't undo the damage they've already done, not that they can't literally change the code (or email addresses) back.

Thanks. I don't want them to get away with not trying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com