Facebook has shocked the world today with their announcement that they will be publicizing all users’ past and current direct messages, in a move that they say will help to “promote honesty.”
Earlier today, CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the policy changes in a status update via his personal, confirmed account. The status has since been deleted, however, it was shared thousands of times, and a screenshot of the original post has surfaced.
The original post read:
“I have been getting a lot of questions about our new direct message policy, which will make messages viewable by the public. It is a policy that we are going to enact over the next couple of updates. We feel it is a good policy that will promote honesty, and it will be retroactive, so old messages will be visible until a week after you deactivate your Facebook account.”
An anonymous source at Facebook was able to confirm that, despite the post being taken down, Facebook is definitely including the ‘public messages’ feature into future updates. The source was also able to confirm the feature will publicize all messages sent over the life of the Facebook account.
“Mark [Zuckerberg] has lost his head. He’s in bed with the NSA, he reads people’s personal messages for entertainment value. He views himself as some benevolent enforcer of morality. Facebook started as a way to connect with people, but now he is on another level,” said the anonymous employee. “The bad thing is, he slipped it into the terms of use years ago – anything you upload onto Facebook servers, including messages, is the property of Facebook, and can be made public. So if you’re using messenger to cheat on your spouse, or to sell or buy drugs, or anything you thought would stay private, you need to prepare yourself for everyone you know being able to read those messages, and probably sooner than you think.”
The new policy has been ill-received on social media. Screenshots of the post along, with angry comments, are spreading across the internet. Facebook users on the whole say they are not okay with the company playing with their private information.
“Facebook sucks, and it has for a while,” said user Mark Jacobs. “I guess with a change like this, it’s time we all move back to MySpace. They not only didn’t have privacy concerns, they let you order your friends into a top 8! God, remember that? Those were the days.”