Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Facebook lost my Email Notification settings

I got an email this morning from Facebook that they have lost my email notification settings. I did not believe that email, I thought it was a phishing email. I checked the url in the email and it seemed valid but for some reason I still could not believe it. “How can Facebook lose my email notifications? Not possible” I thought.




I logged into Facebook and found the same message on the home page. So, the email was legit and Facebook had indeed lost my email preferences.



It is very concerning to me. How can a company like Facebook lose data? Millions of people put a lot of data on Facebook and how can Facebook not keep proper safeguard to make sure data does not get lost and proper backups to restore the data. It is not clear if a programming error or human error cleared all the data or did somebody break into the database/file system and cleared it out. I am not sure if it was just me or others got affected as well?

Did you receive similar message from Facebook?

Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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13 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:41 AM

    You're not alone. Surely they owe us an explanation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I also just came across this message, and, in googling it, came across your post. Strange. It doesn't make me confident in their claims to privacy.. where did the data go? And why, exactly, should i give it to you again??

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous2:12 PM

    What! You got an e-mail? I didn't even get that.

    I had been noticing for a few days I was missing Facebook notifications and one day I logged on to see that same message, but it certainly had lost my settings a few days prior and never told me.

    Not cool.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous6:29 AM

    Me too...can't seem to load my profile consistently either...v annoying...the message appears whenever I log in.
    Hope we see some sort of explanation appear..

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous2:00 PM

    Hi Anil, I got it too. And that is both the e-mail message and the Facebook notification.

    All best,
    Johan

    ReplyDelete
  6. Got that message too this morning. Have emailed Facebook to say I will not be using their service or reset my email settings until I have an adequate reason as to how this happened.

    I run a UGC news website, and we have had to enforce a whole series of security aspects to the site - it's part of our insurance let alone the regulations enforced by the 1998 Data Protection Act. I just cannot believe that Facebook has allowed this to happen. There are security protocols that cannot have been followed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous8:25 AM

    why you have so many unread mail? :P

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous9:51 AM

    i've noticed i've been not getting emails for a month. weird. someone at facebook should get fired.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous1:03 PM

    Same issue here...found your post googling to see if others had the problem.

    Checked my email, sure enough I got one like yours.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous7:03 PM

    This just happened to me too. What's even more concerning is that this seems to be occurring over an extended period of time, from this post on Tuesday until today and perhaps beyond.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous4:41 AM

    I got an email yesterday. You'd think they'd take the time to make the email look legit.

    ReplyDelete
  12. They've lost my settings too. But it's easy to restore it

    ReplyDelete
  13. Now it is getting worse: i don't receive notifications anymore from facebook via email !!

    ReplyDelete

I would like to hear your comments and questions.