I’m actually surprised to not find a post on this already.

“Facebook has been swamped with complaints as users are convinced old private messages are being published on their public timelines.

Complaints have come from users in Britain, America and Europe, who said the private messages were sent between 2007 and 2009, the Telegraph reported.

However, the social networking site has denied the claims, saying there had been no privacy breach as the messages were old public posts that were being re-posted because of a bug.

“A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their timeline,” a Facebook spokesman said.

“Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.”

Colleen Taylor, a writer for an American technology website, wasn’t convinced, however.

She told the Telegraph she had confirmed with friends that messages appearing in their timelines were originally sent as private messages.

Another user in London, said the same thing had happened to her.

“This is worrying. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it. It’s scary. They are private messages and my friends and I used to discuss private things on Facebook,” she said.”

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7725229/Private-Facebook-messages-go-public-users-claim

I know people seem to be in two minds about this but I just had my work mate visit my profile while sitting next to me. Messages that I know had been sent as private were showing to him as posts by others on my wall.

Thoughts?

Well it is just messages from 07-09 they appear in the “friends posted on username’s timeline.” Mixed in with actual wall posts.
If you go down to one of those years it will just be a box showing all of them. In my case about 500 for 2007.
It only seems to shows received messages, however I have also checked a friends profile and found my messages to her in that section of her profile.
I removed them from my profile by setting wall post by others to only be visible to me and this seems to have done the job for now.
Well these are from 2007 so it doesn’t seem to have deleted them from that far back.

@pacey @claudiapoeckl  This was also posted on Snopes as being “not true” with a statement from Facebook:  http://www.snopes.com/computer/facebook/privatemessages.asp

So I was busy telling people it wasn’t true. But then I went and looked at my own Timeline in 2008 and there are all my private messages!!  When you look at the activity log, it says so-and-so posted on my “Timeline” – and I absolutely know those were private messages.  They were not those “wall-to-wall” messages that they had that weren’t really private.  So I’m pretty ticked off!

Thanks for the heads up. I’m going to check mine now.

Whew! I joined in June 2009 so I had not yet had time to screw up, lol!

If it happens again, however… VERY bad! Keep us posted, please.

Robin