After I wrote about a mother in North Carolina who received over 14,000 Facebook messages intended for a teen girl in Mexico because of the girl making a typo while registering for Facebook, I heard from other people via email and the comments section who said they were having the same problem. Their inboxes had been inundated with emails and texts intended for other Facebook users and had been unable to get them to stop, meaning they were getting "Love and miss you. I want to give you this hug :33" messages intended for someone else. Facebook said this happened in "extremely rare circumstances," but when you have a billion users, "extremely rare" yields "at least a dozen poor fools."
Facebook said this happened when a user gave them the wrong email address during registration then confirmed a correct phone number, leaving the address wrongly associated with the account. Even if the person with that email address "disavowed" it when they got a "Welcome to Facebook" (or "Benvenido a Facebook") email, the address would remain associated with the wrong account because every account needs at least one email address attached to it. The bigger problem: there was no way for the person who started getting messages intended for someone else to let Facebook know. Some users tried to reach out to the person whose messages they were receiving, but in many cases, their privacy settings (ironically) prevented them from being reached. "Not sure how to contact [the Facebook user whose messages I'm getting] by email, since I don't know what his 'actual' email is," one frustrated person tells me. "And I can't reach him by Facebook."
Facebook says it has fixed the disavowal problem in the Welcome email moving forward, but that still leaves a bunch of users out there who are receiving other users' messages. (Facebook says it's working on this.) I've been sending along the affected profiles from people who have contacted me to Facebook, but that's not the most efficient way to do this. And what if there are some voyeurs out there who like getting other people's private messages?
To make sure you're not one of the people whose Facebook notifications are going to someone else, you should check your account settings page. Facebook says those users affected by this would have seen the inappropriate email addresses listed here:
If you see an email address that shouldn't be getting your messages there, remove it. This is generally good security hygiene for all users, until Facebook comes up with a better fix.
