It’s been some time since we talked about any problem or failure of Facebook, which knowing his history was beginning to become an anomaly difficult to explain. However, it seems that everything is back to normal, that the “X days without a failure” counter has returned to zero, and that we can therefore stop considering the remote possibility that, finally, the engineering teams of the social network would have managed to solve everything.
There are security problems that expose our data (and Facebook knows a lot about this type in particular), others that affect the operation of the service, and those that, without directly exposing our personal information, do compromise our privacy and can put us in a somewhat awkward situation. And of course, the problem that we have known today could be, in the entire history of Facebook, precisely the worst in this last aspect, that is, in taking out our colors.
If you have been using Facebook for years, or you used it for years, you will remember that for quite some time apps and services became fashionable that, in theory, were capable of detecting which users of the social network accessed your profile and, of course, could inform about it. The truth, in reality, is that Facebook never allowed such information to be accessed, so all these proposals were jokes at best, and malicious tools at the most common. In this regard, it must be recognized that Facebook had always done well.
However, today the social network has lost one of the few remarkably positive points that it had up to now. As we can read in Wccftech, Facebook is experiencing a bug that automatically sends friend requests to those profiles we visit. Despite the fact that it does not occur in all cases, the large volume of messages denouncing this situation suggests that it is occurring quite widely.
I am not going to enter, of course, to assess what to visit profiles without interacting with them, since the motivations for this can range from the most innocent to the most perverse, but it is true that users have used the social network for years, trusting their privacy when visiting profiles. On some occasion I have thought that these visits were translated, a posteriori, into friendship recommendations for the people whose profiles we have visited, but since this can also be due to many other reasons, this did not guarantee anything.
Now, however, many friend requests will be clearly interpreted as supposedly furtive visits to profiles, which can lead to the most uncomfortable situations. And the worst thing is that, for the moment, Meta has not communicated anything about it, so we don’t know if the problem is still active at this moment, if they are already working to solve it, or anything like that. In other words: If you’re still a Facebook user, for now don’t visit the profiles of those people you don’t want them to know you’ve been there.
