Reuters
Most users can’t just erase Facebook messages from the inboxes of recipients — unless apparently that user is Mark Zuckerberg himself.
Three sources confirmed to TechCrunch and a review of a 2010 example by the tech news site showed that select old Facebook messages received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him remain. The Zuckerberg side of those messages, to former employees and others, no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook’s FB, -1.34% Download Your Information tool.
Facebook told TechCrunch that corporate security drove its decision to remove some of Zuckerberg’s messages. “After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages,” it told the news site.
However, Facebook never publicly disclosed the removal of messages from users’ inboxes, nor privately informed the recipients. That raises the question of whether this was another breach of user trust.
For its part Facebook said users may not fully understand how to use the capability, which the company will try to make clearer.
“We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time,” a Facebook spokesperson emailed to MarketWatch.
“And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not,” that spokesperson said.
Read: Facebook says most of its 2 billion users had their data scraped — will people finally leave?
None of Facebook’s terms of service appear to give it the right to remove content from users’s accounts unless it violates the company’s community standards. While it’s somewhat standard for corporations to have data retention policies that see them delete emails or other messages from their own accounts that were sent by employees, they typically can’t remove the messages from the accounts of recipients outside the company, TechCrunch said.
The scrutiny of company actions has intensified amid Facebook’s disclosure this week that data from as many as 87 million of its users may have been improperly shared with an analytics firm tied to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump, up from the 50 million previously reported. It said about 70.6 million of the users were in the U.S. Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before Congress on the breach on April 10 and 11.
In another revelation, the company said “most people on Facebook” could have had information scraped by marketers who used a feature that distributed profile data connected to users’ email addresses and phone numbers. Facebook said it has now disabled the feature. Facebook has about 239 million monthly users in the U.S. and Canada, and 3.2 billion monthly users worldwide. Facebook Messenger, the feature at the center of the TechCrunch review, now has 1.3 billion users.
Read: Some people trying to delete Facebook are facing technical glitches
Facebook shares closed down 1.3% Friday. They’re down nearly 14% in just the past month and down 9.7% so far in 2018.