Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg deleted private messages from people’s inboxes, according to a report from TechCrunch.
While such a feature isn’t available to any of Facebook Messenger’s public users, multiple anonymous sources — including both former employees and non-employees — have confirmed to TechCrunch that chat logs they had with Facebook’s top executive are now missing messages from him.
According to Facebook, the wipe was made in response to the major 2014 hack Sony Pictures that leaked many private messages from top executives. “We made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications,” Facebook told TechCrunch. “These included limiting the retention period for Mark [Zuckerberg’s] messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
However, the social media giant did not publicly disclose that it had done this, nor did it privately message recipients to inform them. When TechCrunch asked Zuckerberg through Messenger about how this may be seen as a breach of trust to the 1.2 billion people who use the service every month, the executive declined to comment.
Instead, Facebook now says it will offer all users the ability to unsend messages in the next several months. Moreover, Zuckerberg will be unable to use the feature himself until it has rolled out to the public. Facebook says of the ways such feature may be offered is through a an expiration timer users could set for messages.
It’s unclear what exactly was in the messages that Zuckerberg deleted, although TechCrunch‘s sources say recent messages from Zuckerberg remain in users’ inboxes. Some old messages before 2014 are also reportedly still appearing to some users, suggesting that not all chats were affected by Zuckerberg’s retractions.
News of Zuckerberg’s secretive message deletion comes in the midst of widespread criticism for Facebook’s role in political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessing the private information of over 87 million users around the world.
On April 4th, Facebook confirmed that over 600,000 Canadians were affected by the data breach.
Zuckerberg is slated to speak about Facebook privacy concerns in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10th.
Source: TechCrunch
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