Facebook Bug Exposed 14 Million Users' Private Posts To Public

Facebook is no stranger to privacy issues, and that includes bugs. In the latest example of a bug leaving private communications exposed, it has been revealed that a Facebook glitch active for a little over a week made private posts visible to the public. Around 14 million Facebook users were potentially impacted by the issue, which Facebook has since fixed.

Facebook has confirmed that the bug was live from May 18 to May 27, 2018, during which time affected users' posts were automatically set to public. Though users could see that the posts were public, it's possible they overlooked the change and expected their preselected privacy setting to be in place. Publicly posted statuses can be viewed by anyone.

A software bug was blamed for the issue, which impacted around 14 million users. Any posts affected by this issue have been reset to adhere to the user's default privacy setting, meaning any accidental public posts are back to private. The damage for some users may be done, though, underscoring the need to exercise caution about what is posted online.

The social network is pushing out a notification to alert the ~14 million users to the security lapse. That alert will be given in the form of a notification placed at the top of their News Feed. According to Facebook, the alert is rolling out to feeds starting today.

Users are encouraged to review their recent posts to make sure none of them are public when they should be private. Users can manually change the privacy setting on the post after it has been published, but obviously that will not retroactively change whether people saw the update who weren't supposed to.

SOURCE: CNBC