Facebook’s gaffe on ‘private’ posts

As many as 14 million Facebook users who thought they were creating private posts last month that only a small group of friends could see were, in fact, making public posts that anyone could view.

Facebook on Thursday blamed a software bug for the problem. The company did not say how it had found the bug, or how it knew the problem was limited to 14 million people.

Facebook said the bug affected users from May 18 to 22, while the company was testing a new feature. By May 27, the company had changed the affected posts from a public setting back to a private one.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement. “We have fixed this issue, and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and are asking them to review any posts they made during that time.”

In other Facebook news, a federal judicial panel has centralized 30 lawsuits seeking class-action status that stem from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal with a federal judge in San Francisco.

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation on Wednesday transferred eight cases filed in Northern California, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas to Judge Vince Chhabria.

The panel also noted there were 22 more “potentially related actions” filed in six federal court districts.

Centralizing the litigation will help eliminate pretrial duplication of rulings “and conserve the resources of the parties,” especially since Chhabria’s Northern District of California court was already presiding over half of the pending cases and Facebook’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, the panel ruled.

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a now-closed British political consultancy, after allegations that it improperly obtained the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook members.