Facebook brings back “view as public” and “edit public details” button directly to profiles. The features had been removed following a data breach last year that compromised 50M accounts including Mark’s and more than 90 million users had to log out. In a tweet posted last night, Facebook announced the reintroduction of the two features to make it easier for users to manage their public visible information.
Today, we're making it easier for people to manage their publicly visible information on Facebook with two updates: (1) we’re bringing back the “View As Public” feature and (2) we’re adding an “Edit Public Details” button directly to profiles. pic.twitter.com/zI5bVwodjp
— Meta (@Meta) May 14, 2019
The “View As Public”button allows users to preview their profiles as they would appear to the general public when someone searches their profile. The social media giant company also added the “Edit Public Details” feature directly on users’ profiles.
Facebook had removed these features since it had a security loophole that allowed hackers to use its code to execute a massive hack that exposed 50 million users. Facebook quickly fixed it but didn’t revive those two features until now, more than six months later.
Facebook bringing back these two features comes in handy in the event of other mishaps such as the one where a bug exposed up to 14 million users’ profiles public. This changed the default visibility setting for status posts yet to be written.
These new announcements come after Facebook’s recent shift to privacy during this years’ F8 conference with the mantra “the future is private” that was not welcomed well among users and critics saying that taking user privacy seriously should have been part of the past and the present too, not the future.
The tweet, however, didn’t talk about the “View as Specific Person” function that was responsible for the security vulnerability isn’t being brought back at this time and will remain disabled.
