Facebook bug changed privacy settings of 14 mn users
08 Jun 2018
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A software bug on Facebook in May changed the audience on the the social media site's users' posts to “public,” even if they had intended to share them just with friends, or a smaller audience.
Facebook shows its users an audience selector so they can decide who gets to see the post. This is based on the people they shared with last time they posted. For example, if a user chooses to share a photo with friends only, their audience selector will automatically suggest they share with friends next time they start a post. If they shared something publicly last time, it will suggest public the time after.
"This bug occurred as we were building a new way to share featured items on your profile, like a photo, Facebook said. "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," The social media giant added.
Around 14 million people were affected by the bug, the company said. Facebook will soon start individually informing the people who were affected by the bug.
Facebook has been at the receiving end of the stick over privacy issues. It is currently facing Congressional scrutiny for data partnerships with Chinese companies. it is also recovering from a whistleblower's revelation that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica was allowed to obtain information on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent.
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