New Delhi: Facebook on Thursday acknowledged that around 14 million of its users’ privacy was compromised, as the messages they were posting to their circle of friends were being shared widely with the general public due to a software bug. The bug was active between May 18 and May 27 on Facebook and had changed users’ posts settings to ‘public’, without users permission and them being aware of it.
Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, said in a statement that a bug has been found that “automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts.” He added that the company is trying to let everyone who was affected know, while asking them to review any posts they had put on Facebook from May 18 to May 27. Egan also asked for an apology for the inconvenience caused to the users.
“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” CNBC quoted the chief privacy officer Erin Egan as saying.
Facebook claimed that it rectified the problem on May 22, but could not change the privacy settings of all the posts. However, it is now notifying all the affected users.
The social media giant had been under scanner lately for the growing online data-privacy concerns like providing privileged access to its API with Chinese companies including Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL, data breaching by data analytics company Cambridge Analytica.
