AT&T has acknowledged a network glitch causing some users to land on strangers’ Facebook accounts instead of their own.

According to an exclusive Associated Press report, a yet unknown portion of AT&T’s wireless customers could be experiencing network issues causing them to land on strangers’ Facebook pages instead of their own.

The story highlighted a Georgia mother and her two daughters who were left dumbfounded when strangers’ accounts showed up when they tried to log in to their Facebook accounts by visiting facebook.com from their mobile phones. The family had no access to the strangers’ Facebook accounts with whom they share no prior relationship, meaning it’s quite possible that the AT&T network itself re-routed traffic to the wrong place.

The report described a few more people experiencing the same issue, all AT&T customers, and reminded of a similar incident last November. This potentially dangerous security issue, the news organization reported, stems from an AT&T “routing problem.” The nation’s #2 wireless carrier has acknowledged the incident, stressing that some wireless customers have landed on the wrong Facebook pages in “a limited number of instances.”

According to a company spokesman, a fix for this “network problem” is underway. Facebook declined to comment and referred questions to AT&T, Associated Press wrote.

Read more at Associated Press

Christian’s Opinion

Incidents like this once more underscore how exposed online users are at times, especially when security issues are blamed on wireless operators. This specific glitch doesn’t bode well for AT&T, although it could have happened to Verizon or any other wireless operator for that matter. When users can’t depend on their carrier to transfer data from point A to point B without a hassle, the basic customer trust is undermined. Good thing those affected users were all responsible individuals who reported the incident, but one day this will happen to someone who might decide to take control of a stranger’s Facebook account and possibly ruin his or her online credibility.

I’m also concerned about eavesdropping, especially on services like Facebook and Google Docs that don’t encrypt network traffic beyond the login page. With our personal stuff exposed on sites like Facebook, the least social services could do is offer users an optional full https access, like Google recently did with Gmail.