At the end of last week, a Facebook bug has been disclosed to the public as part of the company’s latest privacy and security concerns that seem to have plagued the social media company during 2018.
Facebook privacy and security bugs
For nearly a two week period, in September 2018, a bug in Facebooks’s system allowed third-party application developers access to view and download pictures. The total amount of user accounts affected is said to be up to 6.8 Million Facebook accounts. It didn’t actually matter if the pictures had been shared or not or remained private, the fact that they had been uploaded meant they were accessible. As soon as you upload a picture, Facebook immediately stores a copy, irrespective of if you chose not to share the picture – This seems like quite a cheeky little move to me.
Apparently, Facebook will get round to sending you an email or a Facebook in App notification to let you know what actually happened, if you have been affected, and what developer Apps might have your private photos. If you don’t want to play the waiting game and want to know right now, then head on over to this Facebook Page to try discovering further details.
The Facebook bug could be exploited if the App in question used a Facebook Login to sign into a given app and if you gave the App access to your pictures. Most users automatically give access to pictures without really thinking about it. The App is supposed to only be able to access any pictures that you have explicitly already shared online. The problem was that photos shared in Marketplace, Stories, and pictures uploaded and NOT shared were accessible. Users can breathe a sigh of relief as pictures sent in Facebook Messenger were not accessible, as this would have been a total disaster for the company if they had this type of data breach.
In total, up to 1,500 apps from 876 different developers may have accessed people’s pictures.
