ANOTHER FACEBOOK SLIP UP LEADS TO LEAKED PERSONAL INFORMATION OF 6.8 MILLION USERS

Social media giant Facebook announced last Friday that a software bug allegedly gave several app developers access to private photos of about 6.8 million users. This highly likely exposed untold numbers of pictures that online users never thought would be publicly available. The announcement is simply the latest edition to a long list of problems the social network has had with protecting and respecting consumer data. Facebook stated that it intends on also notifying the people who are potentially impacted by this bug via an alert on Facebook. The company is also requesting that most people log into any other applications with which they have shared their Facebook photos to check which photos they have current access to.

A blog post made by the social network directed towards developers regarding the issue discusses on how the bug would have affected and involved people who used Facebook to log in to third-party apps and hence gave those apps access and permission to their personal photos. The company followed by stating that it began on the 13th September and continued for 12 days allowing the bug to give those third-party apps access to photos that users could have easily not authorized to be shared. On one of the Facebook alerts it was stated that the issue was recently found and fixed and that certain apps people connected to Facebook may have been affected. 

You previously gave these apps permission to access your photos on Facebook. Normally, Facebook shares photos that you have posted on your timeline to these apps, but a bug occurred between September 13 and 25, 2018, which gave developers access to other photos, such as those you may have posted to your Facebook Stories or initially uploaded but didn't post.

Facebook's privacy practices have received intense investigations and inspections ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke open earlier this year. The recent incident is understood to have been less severe than past ones with only around 1,500 third-party apps built by 876 developers that were granted access to users’ uploaded photos even if they were not posted publicly to Facebook. Facebook followed up their statement by also explaining why they feel the problem most likely occurred.

When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline. In this case, the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook stories. The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post.

Overall,  this is an essential example to how the concept of digital privacy is fading and that just because the user makes a choice to make any source of online content as "private" doesn't necessarily mean it will stay that way. As for Mark Zuckerberg's globally recognized social networking website and it's recent series of unfortunate events surrounding information disclosure has created an untrusted environment that ironically is being spread through the data breach of the social medium itself.