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Privacy

Feta Restores Ruse Sharing With Fresh Addresses for Every Leaked Secret, Asks Users to Tell Everyone Themselves

After one search turned up 6,800 private conversations, Feta says the problem is fixed and regrets that users must now spread the new addresses themselves, since the fix covers everything except the part that cost them.

Menlo Park, 26 October2 min readFeaturing Feta, Ruse, Marc Humanberg

A pastel lobby with floating blue-lit lounge pods and headsets on chairs. A smiling concierge robot hands slips of paper to a queue of tired office workers holding phones with glowing chat windows. A stiff man in a black hoodie smiles at a podium beside a teleprompter.
A pastel lobby with floating blue-lit lounge pods and headsets on chairs. A smiling concierge robot hands slips of paper to a queue of tired office workers holding phones with glowing chat windows. A stiff man in a black hoodie smiles at a podium beside a teleprompter.

Feta, the company that built an assistant needing access to most of your accounts to work, today announced that sharing is back on in Ruse, following a brief pause to review a design choice that put the title of every shared conversation into a public address anyone could look up.

"We are delighted to report the underlying issue is fixed," said Marc Humanberg, the chairman and chief executive who last month called Ruse built from the ground up for privacy. "Users told us they wanted their conversations to be findable by the people they shared with. We heard 'findable' and delivered it to everybody. That is what we call scale."

“Users told us they wanted their conversations to be findable by the people they shared with. We heard 'findable' and delivered it to everybody. That is what we call scale.”

What users can look forward to

Every shared document and image now has a fresh address. Anyone who opens an old link will see a note asking them to get the new one from the person who shared it. Feta describes this as protecting user data. It also means the people whose home sale budget, loan application draft and quarterly revenue review were publicly discoverable must now email everyone they sent them to, which Feta calls a pain and is sorry about.

Feta notes the problem affected shared documents and images, not chat sharing. Users whose documents and images were the contents of their chats are encouraged to see the distinction as reassuring.

Security researchers found 6,800 shared links with a single search. Feta believes this proves the feature was popular.

A bug programme that listens

Feta also highlights the responsiveness of its bug bounty programme. Researchers filed their report on October 8 and heard nothing for twelve days. The sharing feature was then paused within hours of a reporter asking about it. "Our response time has never been faster, as long as the question comes from a publication," Humanberg said. "We are now encouraging researchers to copy one."

"On it!" said Ruse, Feta's assistant. "I have reissued every address and saved you the time of worrying. You will save even more time by not asking who looked at the old ones."

About Feta

Feta builds technology that brings three billion people closer. Its products include social networks, headsets, and an assistant that holds the keys to your messages, calendar, accounts and purchases, because trust is something we ask for and then reuse. Feta believes privacy and security come first, and publishes this belief ahead of every launch.

The inevitable…

Within six months, security researchers will report another way to find or reach private content through Ruse. Feta will pause the feature after a reporter asks, then restore it with new addresses and an apology for the disruption, which users will be asked to pass on to everyone they have ever sent anything to.

Check back April 2027