Facebook has denied rumours that private messages from up to five years ago had been visible on the pages of users of the social networking website.
Last week, many Irish Facebook users claimed private messages dating from between 2007 and 2009 were visible on their timeline.
A spokesperson for Facebook told The Irish Times: "A small number of users raised concerns after what they believed to be private messages appeared on their timeline.
"Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy."
The spokesperson added: "We have seen this claim before - in late 2011 - and investigated then. We found it to be false. We have also extensively investigated the latest claims. In some cases people may have used wall posts instead of private messages by mistake. Understanding of the two features is much more sophisticated in 2012.
"From a technical perspective, private messages and wall posts/timeline posts are treated as very different types of objects on Facebook. No mechanism has ever been created that would allow a private message to be published on the timeline," said the spokesperson.