Don't panic: Facebook has not made your private posts public

So it turns out that all the panic by new timeline users who said their private messages had been made public is unfounded. A number of users who had been introduced to timeline, raised warning flags, when they said that their private messages from 2009 and earlier had been published on their public timelines. [caption id=“attachment_467295” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  We’re a lot more privacy savvy than we were three years ago: Getty[/caption] But it now turns out that those were all public wall posts to begin with. TechCrunch did some investigations of its own, and found that there was no similarity between the wall posts and private messages. It also spoke to a Facebook representative who told them,

“Every report we’ve seen, we’ve gone back and checked. We haven’t seen one report that’s been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post.”

The Guardian says that the panic is largely because many of us have forgotten how we were using Facebook three years ago. According to the report,

This is more a story about psychology than privacy – we have forgotten how much our experience of Facebook has changed in a short time. A few years ago, Facebook was new enough (and exclusive enough) that we didn’t consider the implications of what we posted. Back when users didn’t have the ability to comment on individual wall posts – the wall-to-wall experience actually looked like this – and before Facebook Subscribe and souped-up privacy tools that let us toggle between publishing to a few, some or all of our friends, the site was governed by a simple concept: share with all of your friends or none.

It turns out that back then, we were simply not educated enough about privacy controls, and it also shows to a large extent, how far Facebook has come in terms of giving us more control over who can see what we post. But before you rest too easy, know this. Facebook has started saving your searches as of today. The good news is that you can easily opt out.