UPDATE: Facebook closes privacy hole

Well whaddya know. Earlier today I posted about my discovery that users of Facebook's mobile version could see all of their friends' email addresses that had been used to set up their Facebook accounts.

At the end of a long afternoon's West End browsing (is there ever anything decent in the sales?), I killed some time on the bus by logging into Facebook. And guess what? That "contacts" button (option 4 on the bottom menu on the Facebook mobile home page) had vanished!

Now, I have a small confession to make. I actually noticed this interesting feature a month or two ago but, being lazy and flighty, I didn't give it too much thought at the time. It was only this morning, when I tried cross-referencing those email addresses with my friends' profiles, that I discovered some were not meant to be shown, and some were not the email addresses that my friends had opted in to show.

All of which means, this feature has been around for a fair while but no-one's really picked up on its implications until now, or at least they haven't publicised them on a main-stream-non-main-stream-media (Is this right? Ed.) site like this one until now. And I find it incredibly hard to believe that no-one at Facebook thought about it before now.

What I want to know is this: why was the "contacts" feature there at all? It came two options after a "friends" feature, which is more what you would expect it to be, and would therefore appear to be redundant. It presented a major privacy flaw, yet it wasn't exactly buried - it's not like I found some clever hack to find those email addresses.

I'm confuddled. And I will try my hardest to find the explanation when I get back to work on Monday...