Be warned: Your old private messages may now be public…

Don’t deny it, since you joined Facebook you must have fallen for a scam like “You can now see who views your profile” or “Look at what this girl did at age 17!” Somehow people just can’t resist clicking on that damn link!

Having been silly enough to fall for one or two of these scams myself, I’ve made a conscious effort to ignore and delete any of these spammy posts.

So when I heard of the latest Facebook privacy glitch, I tried to ignore it. The rumours circulating were that all private inbox messages Facebook users received prior to 2010 were now displaying as public wall posts on their timelines.

It sounded like another hoax. There were (and still are) numerous reports saying it's true, and some that say it's nonsense.

Facebook reacted to the reports and released an official statement saying: "A small number of users raised concerns after what they believed to be private messages appeared on their timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy."

Well, I decided to check out my, and some of my friends’ timelines just to make sure. Lo and behold, there were all our silly high school chats about the cute guys in class, and the bitchy girls in school. Talk about embarrassing!

But, here's the tricky part: I'm still not sure if those were in fact old private messages, or messages that have always been public but just seem so silly, stupid and embarrassing now.

Maybe we just forgot how lame we were when we first joined Facebook? Perhaps we just can't believe the lack of social media etiquette we had?

So don't worry too much.  But I suggest that you go and edit your old posts... just in case.

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Do you trust Facebook’s privacy settings?
  By: Jana Joubert