Facebook sidestepped a privacy gaffe on Monday by fixing a flaw that made it possible to snoop on private New Year's Eve messages sent using a "Midnight Delivery" service.
Facebook took "Midnight Delivery" offline temporarily to patch a vulnerability pointed out by Britain-based blogger Jack Jenkins.
The new feature, which lets people prepare digital messages in advance and have them automatically delivered to Facebook friends the moment the year 2013 arrives, was back in action Monday.
"I have just checked, the bug/oversight has now been fixed," Jenkins said in an update to his blog time-stamped 1435 GMT.
"I don't know how a site like Facebook can continue to take these kinds of risks."
Jenkins outlined in his blog a way to get into Midnight Delivery messages by tinkering with characters in URLs, essentially manipulating electronic address data.
The privacy slip came less than a week after the older sister of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg tripped on the social network's privacy settings, landing in the midst of a debate about "online etiquette."
Randi Zuckerberg, who launched a Silicon Valley themed online reality show after quitting her job handling Facebook public relations, kicked off the controversy after a family photo intended for friends went public.
The picture showed Mark Zuckerberg in a kitchen with family members dramatizing reactions to messages sent with a freshly launched "Poke" feature at the California-based online social network.
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