Every time I write something nice about Facebook, I almost immediately regret it.
@aaronfriedman oh I don’t know… I’m kind of loving it right now. 🙂 *giggle*
— rachel (@rachelr1977) February 11, 2013
Basically, in a good TL;DR fashion, Facebook decided to re-post every single one of my mobile uploaded pictures without my permission. Now, they were completely innocent pictures and ones that I had publicly shared in the past, but nevertheless, not necessarily relevant.
Wait, What Happened?
I don’t know exactly where the colossal screw up happened, but I knew there was something wrong when old images I took were being ‘liked’ in rapid fire. That is usually the sign that you screwed something up 🙂
This image was one of the more ‘popular’ ones that people interacted with.
(And before you judge, this was Purim and a week before we got married. We thought it would be hilarious… ).
So What Exactly Happened?
I was preparing for Purim. Purim is the holiday where Jewish people dress up in fun costumes and deliver goodies to their friends. This among other traditions. Ariella and I have always done a fun theme for our family costume: Snoopy and Gang, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and even Super Mario Bro’s with the little Mushroom.
During a meeting with my boss, I had her open a browser so I could show her all my old Purim pictures. As we were digging around she said to me, “you know, you should just create an album of all your Purim pictures so they are easy to find“.
Obviously that wasn’t a bad idea, but I have always had an issue with facebook albums. They never seemed as simple to use and manipulate as I would have liked.
But she was right. So off I went to create one and at first is wasn’t too difficult, until I got to one of the first ones we ever took together. And guess what. It couldn’t be edited since it was only a profile picture. Which actually makes no sense.
Somewhere along the way, Facebook somehow re shared all 90 images I took on my phone as if I took them that day.
I started wishing for an undo button (which would be a handy little feature on FB).
Oh and by the way, guess what happened when I tried to mass remove them from my timeline? Yep, you guessed it…
Another fantastic feature from Facebook. You can only do 10 at a time. And even better, that doesn’t even really work. So pretty much, they are still there, and I just don’t care.
Facebook WTF!
So I am left with some questions for Facebook:
- How the hell did this happen!?!? Seriously, can you explain it. Because I can’t.
- Why has Facebook kept this process so difficult? If you are stuck for ideas, I can help you design a normal and efficient way to correct this. I have lots of ideas, and they are not only limited to albums. Just ask me.
- Has this happened to anyone else? It’s hard to believe that I am the only one who screwed up like this.
Privacy Concerns
Honestly, I normally don’t make a big deal about security and privacy issues for myself because frankly, I don’t share anything which I would mind if the whole world saw. But I guess this does bring up a subtle reminder that we need to be careful about having our own personal filters or run the risk of having everything shared.
Is It Me, or Is It Facebook?
I hope I was at least able to make some people smile and get a little joy out of this fatal error.
But now, I want to ask the community, or frankly anyone, have you had anything like this happen to you? Maybe, what is the most embarrassing you have shared accidentally on Facebook?