If you've been on Facebook in the past week or so, you may have noticed many of your friends posting their Year in Review. For some people, this was a happy run-through of all the great stuff that happened to them in 2014 — weddings, babies, new dogs, etc. — but for others, it was a painful reminder of everything bad about this horrible, terrible year. One user in particular was very upset by the feature, which he says he avoided using but was advertised to him anyway, using photos from his account. Eric Meyer, a web consultant and writer, lost his 6-year-old daughter to brain cancer this year and understandably did not want to look back on his awful 2014.
Facebook determines what goes in the Year in Review via an algorithm, which obviously has trouble differentiating between good and bad events. Whether or not you choose to participate, the site will continue showing you personal ads for the feature unless you hide them. "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. "The Year in Review ad keeps coming up in my feed, rotating through different fun-and-fabulous backgrounds, as if celebrating a death, and there is no obvious way to stop it. Yes, there's the drop-down that lets me hide it, but knowing that is practically insider knowledge. How many people don't know about it? Way more than you think."
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