In what seems like a horrible d¨¦j¨¤ vu moment, Facebook today disclosed another privacy blunder on its platform. Apparently a glitch in the settings menu caused the posts of 14 million users to become public, no matter how private they were made to begin with.
Supposedly, the goof was thanks to a bug in the ¡®Privacy Settings¡¯ menu on Facebook, that automatically suggested posts be set to public. This means they could be viewed by anyone, including people not even logged into the platform. The incident carried on between May 18 to May 27 before it was noticed and rectified by the team.
¡°We have fixed this issue, and, starting today, we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,¡± Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a statement. ¡°To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before¨Cand they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We¡¯d like to apologize for this mistake.¡±
Supposedly Facebook technicians were able to stop posts from automatically being made public on May 22, but it took them another five days to restore the previous privacy settings of all the affected posts. The problem occurred when the platform¡¯s developers were trying to build in a new way for people to share photos and other items in their profiles. They ended up accidentally making the change to have all posts be made public, rather than just these featured items.
This disclosure comes just three months after The New York Times broke the Cambridge Analytica story, where it came to light Facebook had allowed the data research company to access the personal information of more than 87 million users in 2016. Since then, Facebook has been working overtime to reassure users of their privacy, but this latest incident is not likely to help at all.