Facebook 3.1 Contact Syncing — Got Bikini Pics?
As if Facebook 3.1 for iPhone and iPod touch didn’t have enough problems, dmackdaddy let us know this potentially embarrassing problem he’s experiencing with the new contact picture syncing functionality:
Beware of your profile pics, or your boss might get one of you doing something you don’t want them to see! What happens is, [Facebook 3.1] takes [all] the emails and phone numbers on your iPhone and sends them to Facebook. It then cross-checks and syncs them back to your iPhone. That’s a major security flaw right there! It should only sync the ones you’re friends with.
So for an example I have my coworker’s email and cell but I am not her Facebook friend. All of a sudden when I got a call from my coworker I saw a picture of her in a bikini because that was her [Facebook] profile pic!
I’m using Outlook 2010 and it has a new feature called Suggested Contacts where it keeps all your emails you been using. Those sync to my iPhone via exchange 2007. So now I have Facebook profile pics in Outlook 2010 for a bunch of folks that I don’t even really know just because I have emailed them.
Given the more casual (read: sometimes drunken and debauched) profile pictures that appear on Facebook, and the potential from cross-contamination between trusted friends and respected colleagues, if this is widespread the potential for embarrassment is high. Even if this is an isolated or semi-isolated incident, as more and more social network contact pools are integrated together, its worth remembering that anything — and everything — you put on the internet will eventually be seen by those people you least want to see it.
Remember, if though Facebook thinks privacy is dead, it may still be important to you and yours. So think twice and practice safe pics!
[Image above is a mockup based on the story -- no real coworkers were embarrassed in the making of this post]
January 14th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Wow… how ridiculous is that. The devs really messed up this time.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
it is truly unbelievable how bad facebook messed this update up and whats even more so unbelievable is how they are taking their sweet time getting it resolved…
January 14th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
at least this dude’s co-worker is hott!!
1st
January 14th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
After saying that my Facebook push notification wasn’t working and then the next day it was working perfectly.
I have a problem with contacts who are under their correct name on my phone and then on facebook they are under their nick name and the contacts arent syncing.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
dang… I was 1st when I started typing
January 14th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
It’s the “worlds are colliding” theme…
January 14th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
there is a new update 3.1.2 hopefully some of this **** is fixed
January 14th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
It is probably related to Facebook’s new security settings. If you know about it and then decide to find your way around to the Security Settings page and then find your way to the photos section and change the permissions to only show to your friends, then I assume you are ’safe’. But if your privacy settings for Settings:Privacy Settings:Profile Information:Photos Albums –> Edit Settings Profile Photos –> Everyone Then the Facebook App will share your photos
January 14th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I miss Joe Hewitt.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
beside that one of my friends profile who im sure about his name and email (he is like my bff) now has a profile picture of a stranger and when i press the lnk in the contact it takes me to the owner of the photo some one with a weird name whom im not even friends with
so yah weird
January 14th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Tell me again what’s wrong with getting pictures of hot women in bikinis synced to your iPhone free?
January 14th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
hey…how many times a day are all of you opening the app store to see if there is a new update? i do it about 15 times a f’n hour. fml.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
This update is a joke. Bring back Joe! I have people in my contacts who don’t match up at all in Facebook. For example I have a friend called Nicole B, well the facebook profile shows someone with a European name I can not pronounce. And after deleting it several times it still shows the wrong profile. Besides the syncing problems it crashes constantly and doesn’t let me update mobile photos anymore. FIX THE PROBLEMS!!!
January 14th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
There should be a security option in Facebook that asks individual users if they want their info shared via this app just like there is a warning about personal information being used when using one of the apps within Facebook.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
There’s a simple correction for this on your end: turn off photo syncing.
True, it doesn’t help if yours is the embarrassing photo that’s being synced to the phones of random acquaintances, but perhaps in the meantime, you should make sure your Facebook profile pic is beyond reproach (think school marm or old-timey priest, just to be safe).
January 14th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I think the fix is to make sure your profile is not search-able to the outside world. Its a setting in your privacy settings. The worse part is you can get ppl’s profile pics if you just think about it a bit and then go fetch. I’m sure it’s a feature but I think its a flaw!
January 14th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
@Jason:
So in short, the answer is just “grow the hell up”, which is by far the best advice.
Perhaps realizing that Facebook has decided its none of your business what they do with your stuff, and just check yourself out of the meat market altogether makes more sense.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
My push is pissing me off I get random people’s facebook push to my phone is it because this phone is jailbroken?
January 14th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
BTW, 3.1.2 did NOT fix this. Another flaw is that you might deny having a FB acct but now that I have your FB profile pic and URL in my contacts, you cannot DENY me that you have one! So I want to be your FRIEND!!!
January 14th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
This post is irresponsible. TIPB should only report this if either (1) they can reproduce it, or (2) they can link to a forum thread showing it is widespread.
January 14th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
I’d hit it.
January 14th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
No Bikini pics, but I do get some contacts pictures in the upperleft when they call me. I had seen it in all the iPhone commercials but never knew how. Anyone know?
January 14th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
@caa, it would be far less responsible, given the new privacy settings on Facebook and the increasing ability to sync with mobile devices like Palm Synergy, MotoBlur, and now the iPhone Facebook app, not to warn people that their Facebook pictures can and will move further than they may realize.
The problem with this story is that it’s not actually shocking — it’s completely predictable given the new models for internet contact handling.
So, yeah, we did check into it before posting, and again, hope our readers are better informed now than they may have been previously.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
I can confirm that this happened to me. I synced my address book through the app and suddenly started getting pictures in my Mobile Me address book of people I am not FaceBook friends with, and have no intention of being friends with (work people). I’ve also experienced the incorrect matching problem that is claimed to have been fixed in 3.1.2 (not tried the fix yet though).
I don’t really see this as a problem. If people have their profiles set to public, then you’d sort of expect them to be searchable. Why does an app doing the searching suddenly make it outrageous? It’s not any different to me going to the facebook site and typing in all my contacts names and doing it manually. It’s not as if it doesn’t warn you before hand.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
@Simon, you might be right but ppl dont know what they are fully getting into, so I hope that by exposing this ppl are aware of what they are exposed to. I’m not even 100% sure you can turn it off at all with the comment I made earlier about making your profile unsearchable.
January 14th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Mi Phone Book is planning to launch a sick contact networking app in March. Mi Phone Book is the revolutionary new way to manage your contacts. Mi Phone Book makes it easy to store and keep your contact’s key information always up-to-date. How will this happen? Well lets say I have some friends I know working on this app and truly is going to blow your mind. Follow them on twitter – twitter.com/MiPhoneBook
January 14th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
how do u get the picture to take up the whole screen ;llike a regular contact? when ppl call me i only get their pic on the upper right
January 15th, 2010 at 12:00 am
@Mike: If you are getting a picture only in the upper right corner when people call, it means that the picture saved to the contact is not at a high enough resolution for the full sized screen. Try changing the image and see if that makes a difference.
As for the FaceBook contact exchange, even without the glitches, this feature would be a personal nightmare for me. I have almost 400 contacts on my iPhone but over 800 contacts in FaceBook, many of which I do not know personally. I have contacts on FB for different reasons. Every “friend” in FB that I do not know is in a custom group that has zero access to my actual profile. I could not afford to have all those people blended into my iPhone contacts.
I saw the option to sync contacts in the FaceBook application and knew better. How did people miss that?
January 15th, 2010 at 1:49 am
Nice pics
January 15th, 2010 at 9:31 am
I don’t see the problem.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:47 am
@SpiceRak2: I didnt miss it and I actually wanted it but I thought they would be smart enough to only sync my friends not every email in my Outlook 2010 Suggested Contacts list! The trick is to clean out the suggested now and then.
January 15th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
I disabled photo sync because Facebook is (unfortunately) becoming the new Myspace with idiots setting their profile pics to stupid internet meme pics or flowers or some other dumb trash.
January 15th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Dude that chicks hot, why is he complaining that happend? I can tell she has a great butt.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
You guys didnt read the small print:
[Image above is a mockup based on the story -- no real coworkers were embarrassed in the making of this post]
January 19th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
I have a similar problem. Anybody not on FaceBook all of the same profile pic of some dude in a yellow corvette. Not sure who it is.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:03 am
FB on Iphone is not uploading pictures from my library… Pls advise