A simple privacy issue turned into a birthday disaster!

Many specialists claim that Facebook privacy settings are so complex and misleading. With all this criticism, Facebook team still claims that the settings are straightforward and designed to best serve the peoples’ need for privacy and socializing at the same time.

A contrary example to these claims happened recently when a 14year old girl of Hertfordshire in  England was planning on inviting her friends to her birthday using Facebook, but she forgot to uncheck  the little box next to the “anyone can view and RSVP” before clicking the “create event” button.

What happened?! She got more replies that she could ever expect! With the news spreading all around the internet and creating worries for her and her family and friends, Facebook took down her event page. It was late since many of the Facebook users had already created their own fan pages trying to put her party in the history! Many random users had decided to attend her party and were asking for directions… Imagine that!!!

Instead of being happy of an exceptional party in the history, the girl and the family-being so worried- canceled the party and even called the police to step up their patrols in case of a swarm of Facebook pranksters show up.

The Telegraph say in its reports dedicated to “Facebook party crashers” that the same thing had also happened before with more than 50 gatecrashers at a birthday party in Liverpool and also another case with 100 revelers.

Earlier this year, a small birthday party in Austrailia also got 60,000 RSVPs on Twitter.

Anyway, the moral of the story?! Again and again… check the privacy settings of your social networking accounts before it puts you in a trouble like this. Next time you try to create an event; don’t forget to customize the privacy settings before posting. And remember that if your friend list includes hundreds of guys you have hardly even met, don’t be surprised if you see a few extra faces at your party next time!

And finally, a note to Facebook: Shouldn't event invites be set to "private" by default?