Facebook sorry for painful 'Year in Review'
/ AP-Yonhap
Anyone who has checked their Facebook account recently has probably seen a number of “Year in Review” posts ― Facebook-created holiday cards that highlight a person’s year.
The cards, which are algorithmically customized for each user, are supposed to be cheerful reminders of the year’s best moments.
Problem is, not everyone had a great year.
The company recently apologized to a man who had a painful experience when his recently-deceased daughter was featured on his Year in Review post.
According to the Washington Post, Eric Meyer lost his six-year-old daughter to brain cancer earlier this year.
In a blog post, Meyer acknowledged that the automatically-generated posts likely work fine in the overwhelming majority cases.
“But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year,” Meyer wrote.
Jonathan Gheller, a Facebook product manager, told Washington Post that he had reached out to Meyer and apologized for the pain the Year in Review program had caused.
The card "was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy," the paper quoted him as saying. Gheller said Facebook was looking into improving the program and would take Meyer’s concerns into account.