Facebook API Bug Deletes Contact Info On Phones 178
An anonymous reader writes "If you thought that Facebook's recent unannounced change of its users' email address tied with their account to Facebook ones was bad, you'll be livid if you check your mobile phone contacts and discover that the change has deleted the email addresses of many of your friends. According to Facebook, the glitch was due to a bug in its application-programming interface, and causes the last added email address to be pulled and added to the user's phone Contacts. The company says they are working hard at fixing the problem, but in the meantime, a lot of users have effectively lost some of the information stored on their devices."
Dipshits (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook's programmers have made one mistake after another. I first noticed it when they started redirecting my tablet from the www. to the mobile site. Bastards. They shouldn't be forcing me to a site I don't want to use.
Then they changed my email to cpu6502@facebook.com. And now this story about the programmers erasing cellphone data "by mistake". Does Facebook hire monkeys to do their coding?
The real issue is with permissions (Score:5, Interesting)
When you install an application such as Facebook, you are forced to grant more permissions than is good for you, opening up your phone for bugs like this. Those permission systems should be fixed (as well as the bug).
Wow, thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks Google (Score:3, Interesting)
For the first time, I appreciate your API changes which broke direct contact synchronization through the Facebook app.
Incompetents (Score:4, Interesting)
That is why you do not change data under your user's control, without a) giving them a warning and ask them to opt-in and b) making backups. Any halfway competent software engineer or system administrator knows that. Apparently, Facebook does not have such people and is still half-assing it. These people are really a disgrace.
the bizarre part of FB (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's the really bizarre thing.
Of my FB using friends (eg most of them), about 80% claim to hate Facebook. Yet, they continue to use it. It's like abused-wife syndrome or something. They all go on and on about how it sucks, but they keep going back to him because maybe this time he won't hit me.
It looks to me surely like they are insane. I seem to do just fine iwthout using Facebook at all. I still have a social life, I still interact with my friends online, I still chat w/ ppl and email them, I still know what's going on.
So why the fuck do people keep using it, if they hate it so much? It seems like some weird case of otherwise smart ppl suddenly becoming dumb as rocks.
Re:The real issue is with permissions (Score:5, Interesting)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stericson.permissions&hl=en
Re:BUG?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, 'bug'? Isn't that a bit like saying a behavioural 'bug' caused Facebook to kick my grandmother in the shin? (Which I don't doubt they would do if there was money in it.)
I'm under the impression it was originally planned to replace all your contacts email addresses with the new and improved friendxyz@facebook.com email addresses .. so they can, you know, route all of your email and use it for harvesting yet more information from you.
Re:Well deserved (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel I have some pretty good reasons to sync my phone to quite a few web services, including Facebook. I don't trust Facebook at all in my personal life, but deleting data from my business phone's contacts is a major, major screw-up, and nobody would have expected even Facebook to fail this hard. That said, anybody I knew outside of Facebook has a separate contact in my phone, anyway, but had I not taken that precaution, who knows how bad it could have been.