Hacker News Reader

Comment by tisme | Hacker News Reader

Think about what you're asking for here. You are essentially asking to compound the error facebook made by making a screenshot of their private communications and posting it on yet another open forum.

That's like asking a rape victim to show her bruises publicly or you won't believe it. Pics or it didn't happen applies to lots of stuff but when there are a lot of people with pretty good reputations making the exact same claims then you might want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Facebook is not above making mistakes and the number of people right here that make these claims is too large to simply be ignored or waved away. Clearly something has changed for some people, now the question is how many people are affected and what can be done about it.

View on HN

That's like asking a rape victim to show her bruises publicly or you won't believe it

I get the parallel, but still, the rape analogy feels tasteless and out-of-scale. May I suggest "that's like asking someone what their password is to prove that it was stolen"

You're 100% right, that was a bad call.

It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment but I should have thought about it a bit longer. The weirdness of the request is what angered me to the point of being careless with words.

Hey, nobody is perfect with their spur-of-the-moment statements, especially when angry. Kudos to you for owning up to it.

It's pretty easy to redact a message so as to show they are the same message but without giving away sensitive info. Hell, some of these are probably benign messages like "sure meet you there" or something anyway. Your analogy is ridiculous.

Yes, but 'sure meet you there' wouldn't be quite juicy enough to satisfy the 'that was not private enough so therefore it wasn't a private message' crowd.

With the way sharding works I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was real but only affected an extremely small portion of the users, and in such a way that stuff that had been pushed into the mists of time made it back to the present somehow. That alone would qualify as a bug, the fact that facebook would shine the spotlight on old data like this is worrysome all by itself. If the data was private or in some other way hidden from normal view and suddenly given a much more prominent spot without the users being made aware of that ahead of time then that would be much more serious still.

For sure it seems that something changed.

"Yes, but 'sure meet you there' wouldn't be quite juicy enough to satisfy the 'that was not private enough so therefore it wasn't a private message' crowd."

The whole point of showing it next to a screenshot of the email or the message in the private inbox is to confirm that it is PRIVATE regardless of the actual content. There might be somebody out there who has an unusual interest in other people's private messages, but I think the vast majority of people are looking for something a bit more real than "this happened to me."

That's quite the straw man you're building.

You're asking me to believe what other people say without any proof. I stopped doing that when I lost my religion.

You heard it here folks, an engineering bug that didn't actually happen is tantamount to rape. Perhaps we should stop referring to them alleged bugs and start calling them rapes. I'm sure the rape victims in the audience would love this idea.

Um, blacked out words showing just then first and last letter would be fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com