Another privacy goof-up? FB bug asked 14 million users to make public post

NEW DELHI: Latest in the long line of privacy issues for Facebook, the social media giant on Thursday admitted a software bug suggested some 14 million users publish their private posts in public. The glitch potentially changing the settings of some private post over several days in May.

Facebook says that the problem has been fixed and they are letting the affected users know.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. Today we started letting the 14 million people affected know – and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer.

Later, the social media giant took to Twitter to say, “No private posts were changed to be public. The bug made the suggested audience “public” as opposed to the previous audience setting. Nothing was changed after posted.”

No private posts were changed to be public. The bug made the suggested audience “public” as opposed to the previous audience setting. Nothing was changed after posted. Read more details here: https://t.co/xKiYgxoJ62 … https://t.co/25eh3I3vXw — Facebook (@facebook) June 7, 2018

Facebook claims that the bug did not impact anything people had posted before, and users could still choose their audience in settings.

The bug occurred while “building a new way to share featured items on your profile, like a photo. Since these featured items are public, the suggested audience for all new posts – not just these items – was set to public. The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they’d been using before,” shared Facebook.

This comes days after the recent furor of the company shared user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei, computer maker Lenovo Group and smartphone makers OPPO and TCL Corp. The company is still recovering from the privacy scandal of Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

The company claims the bug occurred while trying to build a new feature. 

"This bug occurred as we were building a new way to share featured items on your profile, like a photo. Since these featured items are public, the suggested audience for all new posts – not just these items – was set to public," said Egan.