One Oklahoma lawyer has declined to participate in Facebook, in part because of the horror stories about privacy breaches. You would think that would make her safe from inadvertent disclosures of information via Facebook. But think again.

This lawyer loves phtography and she had shared photos she made with her friend via text message and email. Due to an automatic update of Facebook in December, every one of the pictures her friend had on her phone were posted to Facebook–automatically. Of course that were no inappropriate pictures, but still this lawyer who had intentionally avoided Facebook found it troubling that numerous pictures of her had been posted there.

I found this a bit hard to believe. But a little research found an article on C|NET Prevent Facebook from automatically importing photos. Sure enough a December update to Facebook provided for automatic synchronization will all photos on your smart phone or iPad with Facebook. And as with all things Facebook, a click in the wrong place can opt you in to the service. You can read the article to learn how to opt out. Supposedly the pictures would be private and not posted to a user's Timeline until it was done manually. I'm not sure that is how it worked in this case.

But the idea of all photos on your phone being automatically posted to Facebook is pretty scary. I imagine somewhere there was someone who was shocked when they logged into Facebook and found their very private pictures had been posted there. And if they all were posted to the Facebook Timeline in December for all to see, in some cases that might have made for some very interesting discussions at Christmas family gatherings.