Another week, another bug, with Facebook’s latest giving unauthorised users access to photos. We’re you affected?
Facebook just isn’t having the best year, and after going through that Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier in the year, it seems the company just can’t escape problems that affect large quantities of its users.
This month, Facebook has let the world know about another issue, with a bug that in September allowed the photos of up to 6.8 million users to be seen by some apps they hadn’t approved.
That’s an issue not just because those apps shouldn’t have seen the photos, but because more often than not, permission settings and restrictions are applied on photos for specific reasons, and they’re usually about intentionally excluding people from seeing said images.
And yet for 12 days between September 13 and September 25, a bug in Facebook’s Photo API let third-party apps users had previously approved to see some images instead see every image.
If you were affected, Facebook will send you a notification about the issue and what apps were affected. so if you don’t receive one of these, you’re probably going to be fine, at least until it does happen.
Given the way things have been going for Facebook and its flaws, it’s likely more a matter of “when” rather than “if”. We’ll let you know when that “if” happens again.
