6.8 Million Facebook User's Photos Leaked Last Week, Here's How To Check If You Are Affected

The dominoes keep falling for Facebook, as it had to admit to another user data leak late last week.

A bug in the platforms API accidentally exposed the private photos of around 6.8 million users to third party apps, even when it wasn't shared to them as part of permissions.

Facebook says it's fixed the issue and is planning to issue a tool for app developers to figure out which of their customers may have been affected by the bug. In the meantime though, you don't have to just sit around wondering if you're in that group. Facebook is also allowing you to manually check for yourself.

The bug was active for 12 days from September 13 to September 25, allowing third-party apps you've connected to Facebook to access even the private photos in your gallery. Normally, the permissions to allow photo access to these apps only allow those on your timeline. In this case however, it also included others like those you've uploaded to Facebook but not shared, or those posted on the Marketplace or Facebook Stories.

The bug provided this access to about 1,500 apps by 876 developers, all of which have been approved by Facebook to access its photos API. Luckily there's a more convenient way to check this than scanning a list of those apps.

Simply click this link provided by Facebook, and it'll take you to a help page describing the situation.

If you're leak-free, the page will look like the picture above. Otherwise, it should show you a list of apps your photos were exposed to. You can't do anything about that retroactively, but you can maybe think about cleaning up the private photos in your Facebook gallery on the off-chance this happens again in future.