In the latest in a long line of Facebook security and privacy mishaps, the company is letting 14 million users know whether or not their posts were accidentally changed from private to public because of a bug that occurred last month.
The bug was spotted by Recode, and the software was apparently live for 10 days without any kind of warning from Facebook. The private/public setting on posts will be the same for new posts as it was on previous posts meaning that many users that keep posts set to private would have no idea about the issue, or wouldn’t have thought twice about checking their status.
If you think you may have been affected, look out for this warning message in your Facebook notifications:
Here's what the notification screen will look like for people who have been impacted by this bug pic.twitter.com/yaj1KMZTGr
— Kurt Wagner (@KurtWagner8) June 7, 2018
Facebook hasn’t released any specifics on the amount of users or posts involved with the bug other than it being up to a figure of 14 million. The company’s chief privacy officer shared a brief statement, simply saying “We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”
This glitch comes mere months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which Facebook faced tremendous backlash for obtaining the data of more than 50 million users – without their knowledge of their consent – to inform voter-targeted strategies for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
