Facebook privacy bug exposes photos
THE YEAR 2018 was one to forget for Facebook, with the social media giant excoriated for selling user data to controversial companies such as Cambridge Analytica, being lax about security, and allegedly turning a blind eye to hate speech and cyber-bullying all over the world. To round off this annus horribilis, Facebook has admitted that a recent bug meant that as many as 6.8 million user photos could be accessed by third-party app developers between 13 and 25 September – including images that users never intended to share publicly. In other words, if you gave an app or program permission to access your photos it could see everything during this period, including pictures you chose not to post for various reasons.
Have you been affected?
Facebook has now fixed the bug and released a statement on its Help pages. ‘ The issue we fixed is related to how apps use our API to access your timeline photos after you’ve given them permission to do so and isn’t related to your post privacy settings. We’re sorry this happened and we’re instructing developers to delete the photos. Developers will then be able to obtain access to the set of photos which would normally have been shared. We recommend logging into any apps where you’ve shared your Facebook photos to check which photos they have access to.’ Logging on to the Facebook help section at bit.ly/ facebook photo glitch will enable you to see whether your photos were affected by this latest privacy headache.