If Mark Zuckerberg decides to send you a message through Facebook, he can delete this message from your inbox after reading it without notifying you that he deleted it!
Facebook uses a secret tool to remove messages sent by the executives from recipients’ inbox, The Guardian reported on Friday (April 6th, 2018).
What does that mean?
This means that if you sent a message to Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook, you will still have a copy forever, but if he sent you a message, he can access your inbox and delete it.
TechCrunch, noticed a discrepancy between the Facebook inbox received, that Facebook can’t delete, and the actual contents of the Facebook inbox. The responses to messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg remain in the messenger history, keeping a record of one-party messages from a two-party conversation.
Facebook says that the change was made after the Sony Pictures breach in 2014, when a massive break-in of the film company data caused the leak of embarrassing email messages of several executives, which eventually led to the loss of Sony Cofounder Amy Pascal.
Facebook told TechCrunch that “After Sony Pictures’ messages were hacked in 2014, we made a series of changes to protect our executives’ communications, including reducing Mark’s message retention period in the Messager application. We have done this in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
You can send encrypted messages that disappear automatically
The lack of disclosure about this kind of message has angered some Facebook users, as is the case of the absence of any similar tool for users.
But since 2016, Facebook users have been able to send hidden messages, through the encryption function of the Messenger application, but they can’t run that tool retroactively or scan any message sent previously in 2016.
On the contrary, Zuckerberg’s more than 4-year-old messages appear to be the bulk of those deleted content, according to TechCrunch.
The news about the email hacking spread, at the same time, the CEO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, apologized, following a similar apology made by Zuckerberg earlier in the week.
Sandberg told the Financial Times: “We made mistakes and I assume the responsibility. There are practical things that we have to change in this company, and we are changing them, we have to learn from our mistakes and correct them.”
Cambridge Analytica again!
The comments repeated Zuckerberg’s previous statements when the data breach occurred by the British company Cambridge Analytica, he said: “It is my responsibility … I started in this place, so I’m responsible for what happens here”.
Sandberg also highlighted a clear data crisis on Facebook, referring to the news that say: “the majority” of company accounts have been “sold” by unknown third parties, misusing the user’s search tool.
In an interview with the Bloomberg newspaper she said: “We have the ability to search people by name or email, which is important for finding them.” She continued: “Someone used it in a wrong way, but, to be very clear and specific, all this information was available, for the entire audience through Facebook.”
