Private posts went public, says Facebook

FACEBOOK users on private settings have been unwittingly publishing their posts in public owing to a bug in the software.

The social media giant said that regardless of their personal settings as many as 14 million users unknowingly went public over several days in May.

The problem, which Facebook said it had fixed, is the latest privacy scandal to affect the company. The bug automatically suggested users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to “friends only” or another private setting. If they did not see the default notice, they may have unwittingly sent their posts to a broader audience than intended.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said: “We’d like to apologise for this mistake,” adding that the bug did not affect past posts. The company is notifying users affected during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts. People can also manually change their privacy level.

It follows the recent furore over Fa- cebook’s sharing of user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei.

It is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Donald Trump-affiliated data-mining firm accessed the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, said on Twitter that this “looks like a viable Federal Trade Commission/state Attorney General deception case.”