The famous social media due to a bug has made public by default millions of posts published in May 2018 by users, here's how to remedy
Facebook in these hours is coming to terms with another major breach for the privacy of users. This time the problem is not a third-party company as in the case of Cambridge Analytica, but it was an internal bug in the famous social media that put at risk the security of 14 million subscribers.
The flaw in the code of Facebook made the posts of 14 million subscribers visible to everyone, despite the fact that they wanted to share them only with their friends. On Facebook, in fact, we decide who can see and who cannot see what we publish. Thanks to the privacy settings, in fact, a post can be visible to all, if Public, only to Friends, or Friends of Friends. Because of the bug already mentioned, however, between May 18 and 22 the posts of 14 million users were set to Public by default despite different settings chosen by people. This means that anyone was able to view the posts published on those dates despite the limitations chosen by users.
Facebook privacy bug, what happened
Facebook said the error occurred because of a new feature for posting photos that developers were testing in May 2018. Once the bug was found by cybersecurity researchers, it took Facebook developers about five days to be able to repair the damage. In the meantime, however, the posts published by most people remained Public. From Facebook they say that the bug has already been fixed and now the published posts are visible according to the privacy settings chosen by the users. Moreover, Facebook allows you to successfully edit the posts published during the period affected by the bug to change the content made public by default by the social media.
How to check if you are involved in the Facebook privacy bug
To know if you are a victim of the Facebook bug you won't have to do much. It will be the same social network to warn users of the bug that has involved their privacy with a pop-up message the first time you access our profile. The message will warn us that some of our posts set as private may have become public due to the bug and then we can go and change the privacy settings. Facebook has also made it known that this kind of pop-up message will be used for every security warning in the future.