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Facebook’s privacy woes continue as bug exposes up to 14M users’ private posts
Facebook Inc. disclosed on Thursday that an engineering error has mixed up the sharing settings of 14 million users, potentially exposing countless private posts.
The incident lasted from May 18 to May 27. It occurred while Facebook was working to implement a new way for users to spotlight “featured items” on their profiles. The plan was to have such items made automatically public, but the social network accidentally applied this setting to normal posts as well.
Facebook said the glitch had overwritten the affected users’ existing settings. The recommended visibility level for posts, which is normally based on a person’s privacy settings and past activity, changed to public. As a result, status updates that users intended to share with only a limited group of contacts may have made been available for everyone to see.
Facebook said that it fixed the bug on May 22. However, it took the social network’s engineers another five days to revert the settings of everyone affected fully. Facebook has sent out a notification to the 14 million users caught up in the incident asking them to review their recent posts.
“We have fixed this issue, and, starting today, we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Egan said in a statement. “To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before – and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”
The incident is the latest in a string of recent privacy debacles that have rocked Facebook. Just this week, it was revealed that the company had shared user data with over 60 device makers, including several Chinese firms. Among them is Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is under scrutiny from the U.S. government over spying concerns.
These latest debacles come as Facebook is still trying to fix the reputation damage caused by its now-infamous dealings with Cambridge Analytica. The scandal affected the data of some 87 million users and sparked an immense outcry against the social network’s privacy practices.
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