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Comment by jpeterson | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but it is a Facebook bug. Facebook could've easily instructed google not to index these pages.

It wouldn't have mattered. The user republished a Facebook email on a non-Facebook venue (such as a public mailing list archive), thus exposing their email address. See, for instance, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/salemwhitemagic/message/89

That's a lame excuse and as corywatilo has pointed out is untrue (at least for his email... and probably others).

There is no way for Google to find those pages unless those pages are linked from somewhere else or Google is getting URLs from users' browsing activity. The first scenario makes this relatively harmless. The second makes it a privacy issue on Google's end.

Even so, why put private details on a publicly accessible page?

That page has to be publicly accessible. It is sent to users without Facebook accounts. It doesn't need to be indexed, but it's not the huge bug people are making it out to be. It's a tiny bug.

I understand that the page has to be public, but why include the email address there? The person who received the link knows what email address it applies to. Every opt out/unsubscribe page I've used didn't display my email.

> The person who received the link knows what email address it applies to.

No they don't. Plenty of people have multiple email addresses forward to one account. Showing the email address helps, and it's harmless unless people post the link somewhere else on the internet.

Maybe a better term would be oversight.

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