Facebook’s New Privacy Headache Involves Bug That Affected 14 Million Users

1
facebook antiitrust

facebook publishers newsfeed

Facebook is not having a great year.

The company is being reported to have another privacy screw up, as reported by TechCrunch. This issue affects your privacy of your Facebook posts when you are creating them. Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan, gave the publication the following statement:

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. WE have fixed the issue and starting today, we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. 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.”

Apparently this bug was active on May this year between 18th and 27th and Facebook started fixing it on May 22nd. The bug came about when Facebook was building a featured items option on your profile which highlights content that are publicly visible. This setting extended this public visibility to all new posts on the affected users.

The company was clear to highlight that it has to be more ‘transparent’ about its product and privacy especially when they mess up and will show these alerts when they show up.

It is commendable that Facebook has brought this issue to light and fixed it before it became a big issue. We’ve seen how a privacy scandal could affect Facebook, like how they lost over $132 billion in perceived market value thanks to the falling shares.

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.