You might want to check your settings…
Months after getting tangled up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal which revealed that election campaigns were using sensitive data belonging to their users, Facebook is caught up in a fresh privacy problem.
The social media giant today had to warn 14 million of its users that they may have been impacted by a bug which changed the automatic privacy setting for status updates and photos to Public, instead of whatever the user had previously selected themselves.
This means that users could have been posting material publicly, entirely unbeknownst to them.
Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan provided a statement to tech website TechCrunch: “We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before – and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”
TechCrunch further reported that the bug was in affected users between May 18 and May 22, and that Facebook had changed users’ settings back by May 27.
Users who may have been affected are still being advised to check on their privacy settings.
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