Facebook, which has come under increasing fire for violating the privacy of users, had to shut down its chat feature temporarily today to fix a serious breach of user privacy.



A bug allowed anyone to view live chats and contact requests of their "friends," and ironically enough, the loophole was only accessible through a link to edit your own privacy settings.

The chat feature has since been restored, with Facebook issuing a statement that "We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented."



Poor software engineering and testing at the company has in the past led to messages from users ending up in the wrong inbox, and accidentally exposing the private email addresses of users.



Facebook's increasing breeches of user trust have even spawned a new term, "zuckering," as in "That user-interface totally zuckered me into sharing 50 wedding photos," inspired by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who once used private Facebook data to access email and other accounts of classmates while at Harvard.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny8ui4delEo&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=425&h=341]



Jackson West is this close to deleting his Facebook account, except that apparently doing so is complicated and Facebook would probably just archive the data anyway.