Facebook is again on target after revealing that the private posts of 14 million users were made public accidentally because of a bug. Facebook admitted that a recent bug has changed the privacy settings for nearly 14 million users and made their data available to the public while the posts settings were set to private. The error in the software caused the default settings to be set to ‘public’ while the post was originally shared with a limited number of people only.
Facebook also revealed that the bug was active between May 18 to May 27 but the company managed to fix it on May 22. The settings of some posts were not able to be changed in these five days. According to a report, the event occurred when the company was trying to introduce the featured items option on the user’s profile which will be highlighting photos, videos, and other content. The featured items are displayed publicly but Facebook extended the feature accidentally to all new posts of the users. The issue has been fixed now and the status of users have also been changed back to the default privacy settings.
Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said, “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 faced another scrutiny in March 2018 when it was revealed by Chris Wylie that the firm has used data of nearly 85 million Facebook accounts without the user’s consent and influenced the US presidential elections in 2016. After that, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced a huge reaction from its users. The CEO of Facebook also had to take several rounds of the US Congress and the EU where he was questioned for several hours and apologized publically over the scandal and promised to deploy the tools which will protect the user’s privacy.
