Facebook Apologizes To Bereaved Father For 'Year In Review'
Dec-29-2014

Facebook rolled out a new feature this December called "Year In Review," a post that showed up on users' News Feeds highlighting their most popular photos of the year. Users could view their Year In Review and choose to share it with friends with a line reading "It's been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it."

For some, however, 2014 was not such a "great year," and some were upset to see these automatically generated posts appear in their News Feeds. Web design consultant and writer Eric Meyer was disturbed to see that his Year In Review featured photos of his daughter, who died this year.

"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 in a blog post last Wednesday.

"To show me Rebecca's face and say 'Here's what your year looked like!' is jarring," Meyer wrote. "It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate."

Facebook expressed remorse for the accident in its response. "[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy," Jonathan Gheller, the product manager for Facebook's Year in Review app told the Post. The team is considering ways to improve the Year In Review, he said. Gheller also personally emailed Meyer an apology.

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