Facebook acknowledged Thursday that the private posts of around 14 million of its users turned public by default because of a strange bug.
Millions of users that genuinely thought that they were sharing their thoughts just with their closest friends or family members are in for a big surprise. Facebook posts are usually set to private by default. However, a glitch that affected the social media giant’s servers between May 18 and May 27 turned the posts public automatically.
While Facebook users can easily tell when a post is public, many of them could have overlooked the detail as they were used to their older privacy settings. Facebook said that the 14 million affected users will receive a notification about the bug.
The Issue Has Been Fixed
Meanwhile, the problem has been fixed and affected Facebook posts have been turned back to private. The company’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan promised to brief all affected users about the bug and ask them to review the posts that were made public by mistake.
We’d like to apologize for this mistake,
the Facebook executive said.
It is not the first time, Facebook has an oops moment when it comes to its users’ private data. Earlier this year, the company confirmed that the private data of 87 million users was leaked to a Russia-linked firm.
The latest glitch was spurred by the app’s efforts to set items on users’ profiles as featured. For some weird reason, the featured items, such as images, were turned public by the system. As a result, all posts of 14 million users defaulted to public from May 18 through May 27.
Private posts created before May 18 were not turned into public posts by the glitch, the company underlined.
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