Facebook has said that private posts on its platform from May 18th to May 22nd of last month may have been inadvertently shared to the public. According to the world’s biggest social media brand, the incident was caused by a bug in its system, which had affected about 14 million Facebook users.
The company has clarified that it had since resolved the issue. However, the social networking giant also claimed that it did not make the posts private again until the May 27th, which means that any potentially sensitive post could have been read by the users’ acquaintances during that nine day period. Those affected will see a pop up message that says “Please review your posts” in their Facebook feed, so that they can check for themselves which posts (that were supposed to be private) might have been unintentionally shared publicly.
So what exactly caused all this? As explained by Erin Egan, the chief privacy officer of Facebook, there was a bug that automatically recommended to a significant number of users to share their posts publicly when composing their posts. As mentioned earlier, the bug has since been removed, and now Facebook is requesting people to review their posts, especially those made during May 18th to May 22nd.
Facebook further elaborated that it was actually conducting trials on a new feature, which would suggest to users to publicly post featured profile items. The problem was that the company had accidentally set “public” as the default for posts. This meant that if a user did not notice that his default sharing setting was now set to “public,” any post he makes would automatically be shared publicly.
While it is true that it remains the number one social media platform across the globe, Facebook has received a lot of flak lately. Earlier this week, the New York Times had reported that the company had given Huawei special access to data pertaining to Facebook users. According to the report, both companies had struck an agreement (perhaps dating back to the start of this decade) that the Chinese mobile giant would have access to user data. Apparently, Facebook has similar deals with other tech companies that include Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL.
Not surprisingly, this piece of news may put Facebook in the hot seat again. United States Senator Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts) has already written a letter addressed to Senator Bob Corker (Republican, Tennessee) and Senator Bob Menendez (Democrat, New Jersey) -- the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, respectively -- to urge them to call Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg himself, to testify about his company’s practice of sharing user data (some of them private) with phone makers (especially those from China).
