There’s been a number of people who have been consistently receiving random notifications from Facebook after providing the social network with their phone numbers for two-factor authentication. Here’s where things get worse because if users try to cancel it by replying to the message, say with STOP or CANCEL, Facebook would post their replies as a status update for everyone to see on their timeline.
Facebook has now come out and admitted that the issues have been apparently caused by a bug and have promised to a roll out a fix that will stop non-security-related notifications in the next few days. Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said that the website didn’t intentionally mean to spam users who signed up for two-factor using their phone numbers. They company doesn’t want its users to deter people away from signing up for 2FA.
“[T]he last thing we want is for people to avoid helpful security features because they fear they will receive unrelated notifications,” he said. Stamos revealed that the responses to the notifications getting posted as a status update were due to an old feature that allowed posting via text message. Of course that feature is no longer useful because there’s WiFi hotspots everywhere and mobile data becoming even more common. The social media giant is now working to deprecate the feature from its offerings so that you don’t update your status via text messages.
While Facebook has announced that a roll out will come soon, those that are affected by the bug can go to Settings > Notifications to switch off text message notifications. Give it a try and see if doing this will work for you. V
