Sick and tired of seeing the phrase “It’s been a great year, thanks for being a part of it” on your Facebook Newsfeed? Unfortunately, for some, it’s more than just annoying to have the same phrase followed by a similar image taking over half of your Newsfeed. For certain people, the “Year in Review” video auto-generated by Facebook has been bringing back some pretty horrible memories that were anything but great.
Web designer, Eric Meyer, recently shared on his personal blog on Christmas Eve how Facebook’s Year in Review video mechanism could go horribly wrong for some. The mechanism will pull out random posts and photos that have been posted onto a Timeline throughout the year. Sadly, for Eric Meyer, Facebook pulled out the image of his deceased daughter, surrounding the image with celebrating icons.
“Yes, my year looked like that. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl.” – Meyer wrote on his blog.
Facebook has since apologised to Eric Meyer, and Meyer updated his blog to apologise to Facebook for making this such a huge deal, and for bringing this up right before Christmas. Eric Meyer says that he’s not picking on Facebook and this is just an example of how things could go wrong. “This happens all the time, all over the web, in every imaginable context”. In his original blog post, he wanted Facebook to make it easier to opt out of such content, or at least, for Facebook to stop displaying auto-selected images by default.
(Source: Eric Meyer via: Ars technica)
