Facebook on Friday announced that this social network managed to expose the privately uploaded pictures of its users without asking for their permission. This was actually a bug that changed the private pictures to public. The company mentioned that this bug allowed 3rd party application developers to obtain access to the photos uploaded by users under private mode that was not supposed to be shared publicly. Facebook as of now states that this bug could have affected as many as 6.8 million social network users in its platform.
Facebook’s European compliance is scrutinized by the company named Irish Data Protection Commission. IDPC on Friday mentioned that it launched the “Statutory Inquiry” for Facebook after multiple breaches surfaced post being informed by the company last year. This issue wasn’t just limited to the pictures that were uploaded privately by the users. The bug affected the pictures that are uploaded but not posted. The 3rd party developers had obtained access to these pictures along with all the images that were posted over Facebook Stories. All these issues were confirmed by Tomer Bar, the engineering director working for Facebook. He explained the issues on his blog post.
On behalf of the company, he explained that the social media giant is sorry that this incident happened. This issue surfaced in the month of September during a period of 12 days as confirmed by this blog post. When Facebook was asked why it waited long before informing the public regarding the issue, a spokesperson for the company explained that they have been working day & night investigating the issue right from the moment of its discovery. The team has been trying to understand the impact of this bug in order to ensure contact is established with the right developers & people that have been affected by this bug. It took Facebook time to create a particularly meaningful method for notifying the users while getting the translations done.
As of now, the information being dispatched by Facebook to the 3rd party application developers is still under scrutiny. During the early half of the year, data scientists at Cambridge Analytica mentioned that the company several prior today used a system in order to gather data for millions of Americans. As a result of being invaded by this bug, Facebook now believes that the pictures might have been available for 1500 applications. The company also promised that it will soon notify all the people that were potentially impacted due to this bug.
