As it turns out, it was a false alarm. The "private" messages that were appearing publicly on people's Timelines were never private at all -- they were just old wall posts from 2009 that people had, well, forgotten about.
Facebook told that they have checked every report and have found no privacy breaches. Instead, users are just confused -- before 2009 there were no Likes or comments on wall posts, and so the posts look more like private message threads.
Facebook also says that there are technical barriers between the two systems that prevent such a privacy snafu from ever happening.
"The two systems are totally separate," Facebook said.
The issue was first reported in French newspapers, including and , and may have come to light because Facebook's new Timeline format was recently pushed to French users.
Though there's no real story here -- there's been no Facebook privacy snafu, and private messages are still private -- the fact that people actually forgot they'd posted personal-sounding messages on public walls raises a few questions. For example, how much of our online social lives are (still) on the Internet, ready to come back and bite us in the butt at any moment?
You see, Facebook's record-keeping process is like its . In the same way that frictionless-sharing , Facebook's record-keeping makes us bad record-keepers. Certainly, it's nice to have a record, which includes major events and small, touching moments, of your life. But it's not quite as nice to have every moment of Internet-stupidity, such as the time you got kind of drunk and posted to 143 people's walls, recorded for posterity. Instead of giving us a digital scrapbook, Facebook gives us a digital transcript -- and it's usually not pretty.
And that's why it's a good idea to take another look at your Facebook Timeline, and what you've done over the past several years you've been on Facebook.
It's hard to get rid of old Facebook posts, even if you know you're never going to look back on them and reminisce. It's also time-consuming, since you have to . To make the entire process easier, do it in chunks. Whenever you have an hour or two, fire up a Netflix movie and indiscriminately delete old posts.