Bug made private FB posts public

Users asked to review settings

Facebook said yesterday that a software bug made some private posts public for as many as 14 million users over several days in May.

Facebook said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to “friends only” or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.

The news follows recent furore over Facebook’s sharing of user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Even if the bug was an accident on Facebook’s part, Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University said in an email that the FTC can bring enforcement action for privacy mistakes.

Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users, says the bug was active from May 18 until May 27. While the company says it stopped the error on May 22, it was not able to change all the posts back to their original privacy perimeters until later.

The mistake happened, the company said, when it was building a new way for people to share “featured items” on their profiles. These items are automatically public. In the process of creating this feature, Facebook said it accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts public.

When people post to Facebook, the service suggests an audience for their posts, based on past privacy settings. So if you made all your posts “friends only” in the past, it will suggest that you make your new post “friends only” too. You can still manually change the privacy of the posts and this was the case during the bug’s life span too. – AP/ African News Agency (ANA)