Send a Facebook message to anyone's inbox, for free

[DennisP]

It's kinda sad that Facebook gives people a way to rat people out for using fake names. I hope they don't see much usage.

[znowi]

I think it's not kinda sad, but outright offensive. I understand the commercial value of a fully identifiable and tracked person online, but there has to be a line to draw.

Every transparency feature is opt-in by default. Privacy is slowly becoming a dirty word for people who have something to hide. And those who fight for it are marginalized and made look as villains.

It is really bizarre to witness. At some point this rush for user identities reminds me of the Wall Street and their unregulated lust for profit despite the consequence.

[tsiki]

It's useful for exposing profiles where someone is pretending to be someone else.

[peterkelly]

I heard that apparently there's a thing called "email" where you can send messages to anyone for free.

[jey]

Facebook is working on making that useless too by changing everyone's profiles to only list their @facebook.com address and redirecting all email from non-"friend"s to the bit bucket labeled "other" in Facebook's message center.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/facebook-changes-e-...

[alttab]

Yeah but thats not Facebook, you see.

[bjoe_lewis]

and you never get a random beautiful girl's email address straight away, peter.

[martin-adams]

I'm sure this is probably a quick way to get your account shut down as sending reports that aren't valid concerns would probably be frowned upon.

Good find though.

[dasil003]

Having your Facebook account locked is the gift that keeps on giving.

It gives you a legitimate excuse not to use Facebook that all your friends must accept unquestioningly, and if the reason is because you sent the Zuck messages he didn't want to receive then you get an awful lot of hipster cred as well.

[thefreeman]

Actually, you don't have to check the final "Submit a report" box to send the message, so I don't think you are actually even submitting one.

[benjlang]

Have you sent this post to Mark Zuckerberg using this tactic?

[jmix]

I wonder how much time the OP provided to FB to respond.

[chmars]

Why should you provide any time to Facebook to respond with regard to a feature that works as intended (but can – like most features – be used for other purposes)?

The report/block function is a classic in this regard: In the best case, it helps Facebook to identify unwanted content. In many other cases, however, enough reports simply lead to the automatic disappearance of maybe controversial but otherwise completely acceptable content. In general, the freedom of speech should of course prevail, i.e., reporting content as well as blocking content should the exception and not the norm.

[nwh]

It took two months for a response for me from their security team, and in the end their team dismissed my bug as a discrepancy in privacy settings (it isn't). For me at least, it's not really worthwhile trying to make an information leak a publicly known fact — nobody really cares.

[michaelkscott]

Well, for one thing, it feels a lot better to share an 'exploit' publicly than to tell the developers privately.

Especially when it's something like FB. And it sure can boost one's self esteem even by teeny-tiny bit.

That said, I doubt OP waited even 3 minutes before deciding FB is not responding early enough not to post ;)

[JonasKingsley]

What do you mean?

[justplay]

i just found i have "other" folder in my fb

[alttab]

Sounds like the job of a junior-level developer at Facebook, without the product management oversight of the feature. Whoopsie.

[randartie]

Or simply a feature that existed prior to the other folder.

[cihad]

does not work anymore

[chmars]

For everyone or only for Mr. Zuckerberg?

In my case, I can still use the function for content posted by my friends …

(Don't worry, I didn't report them, I only went as far as the message dialogue and immediately when back to click 'undo'.)

[JonasKingsley]

genius! Good exploit:)