Rosa
Golijan , NBC News 1.1.13
Facebook
Facebook
took down the Midnight Deliveries app after a security glitch exposed users'
messages
Whew!
Facebook saved countless users from New Year's Eve humiliation ... after
initially exposing their private messages.
Facebook's Midnight Delivery app allows users to
schedule private messages to wish friends a happy new year exactly when the
clock strikes twelve. This is fantastic for those who intend on having a glass
of Champagne or five as 2013 approaches, as it will let them schedule a polite
message along the lines of "Happy New Year, my beloved friends!"
instead of drunk texting everyone something like "I'm sooooo
wasted right nowljskf and happy NEW YeAr! 2013 FTW! YOLO!" when the ball
in Times Square drops.
Now
great as Facebook's little app sounds, there was just one problem: A
security glitch temporarily exposed users' scheduled messages to the
general public.
The Next Web's Robin Wauters
reports that when a user scheduled a Midnight
Deliveries message, he or she was presented with a confirmation page.
Unfortunately, that confirmation page could be viewed by anyone who happens to
guess its URL. "You couldn’t see who sent the messages," Wauters explains,
"but you could see all the intended recipients, and the message itself, if
you tweaked the URL the right way."
Those
toying around with URLs could also see images which were attached to those
scheduled massages. And to add insult to injury, they could also delete the
correspondences.
"We
are working on a fix for this issue now," a Facebook spokesperson told NBC
News via email. "[A]nd in the interim we have disabled this app on the
Facebook Stories site to ensure that no messages can be accessed."
Perhaps
the more prudent approach, for the time being, is to just plain type out a
"Happy New Year!!!!1!!!" text message and send it to everyone in your
contacts at midnight.
Want
more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you
keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter,
subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling
her on Google+.
No comments:
Post a Comment