Facebook Apologises For Disturbing 'Year In Review' Blunder

Facebook Apologises For Disturbing 'Year In Review' Blunder

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook's decision to automatically combine your pictures and status updates into a chirpy 'Year In Review' video without your knowledge hasn't exactly gone to plan.

Mark Zuckerberg's social network has been forced to apologise after a bereaved father had pictures and updates about his dead daughter included in his personalised clip.

Web consultant and writer Eric Meyer said he was disturbed by the video, and wished Facebook would be more considerate of those for whom 2014 was not such a "great year", as its boilerplate copy suggested.

"For those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year," Meyer wrote in a blog post.

"To show me Rebecca's face and say 'Here's what your year looked like!' is jarring. It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate."

His story was picked up by the Washington Post - forcing Facebook to look into it, after which they issued an apology.

"[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy," Jonathan Gheller, the product manager for Facebook's Year in Review app told the Post.

He added that he had personally emailed Meyer and was looking into ways to improve the feature for 2015.

However Meyer has also responded - and offered Facebook an apology.

"No, not the other way around," he said, writing that the apology was sincere and that he was ashamed to have "dropped the Internet on [Gheller's] head for Christmas. He and his team didn't deserve it".

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