Private lesson
Facebook apologises for software bug which saw users’ posts go public
A FACEBOOK software bug made the private posts of 14m people public, regardless of their privacy settings, the social network has admitted.
Facebook said the flaw, which affected users over several days in May, had now been fixed. It is the latest privacy issue to hit the social network.
On Facebook, users can select whether to send posts out to “friends only” or to make them “public”, which means anybody can see them. The bug caused Facebook to automatically suggest posts be free for the world to see, no matter what the settings were.
Erin Egan, Facebook chief privacy officer, said the bug had been fixed and did not affect older posts. “We’d like to apologise for this mistake,” she added.
The issue occurred between May 18 and 27. Facebook will be sending a notification to all users who were affected.
The message states: “The problem has been fixed, and we changed the audience of any posts you made to what you had been using before, just in case. You can go to Activity Log to review the posts you made during this time.” The bug is just the latest privacy problem for Facebook, which is attempting to reassure governments and users that it can keep data safe.
Ms Egan said: “We’ve heard loud and clear that we need to be more transparent about how we build our products and how those products use your data – including when things go wrong.”
Facebook said the bug occurred when it was testing a new “featured items” tool for user profiles, which would give them a new way to share certain posts publicly.
However, this caused all posts from affected users to be set to public. The feature was only being tested on some profiles, rather than the whole of Facebook.
The bug comes at a sensitive time for Facebook after the details of as many as 87m users were accessed by a datamining researcher and sold to Cambridge Analytica, which used the details for political advertising.
The ensuing scandal has seen Facebook hauled before politicians to explain how it ensures user privacy.
It is thought more than a million British users were affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is not clear how many British users were affected by the latest bug.
Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, said that this latest privacy flaw could affect a legal agreement with the US’S Federal Trade Commission, signed in 2011, which says that Facebook must get “express consent” before sharing information beyond the default settings.
“Facebook made a representation that its sharing setting would maintain the most recent privacy preference,” he said. “That wasn’t true.” The privacy sharing button is one of the main tools users can employ to give themselves greater levels of privacy, creating “affirmative”control over their settings, as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told US politicians in April.
“Every time that a person chooses to share something on Facebook, they’re proactively going to the service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a message to someone, and every time, there is a control right there, not buried in settings somewhere,” he told Congress.