Facebook has acknowledged a bug in its system which has turned its users private profiles to public with more than 14 million accounts affected.
In a post chief privacy officer Erin Egan explains this bug occurred as the company was building a new way to share featured items on its profile.
She explains, “Since these featured items are public, the suggested audience for all new posts – not just these items – was set to public. The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they’d been using before.”
Facebook alerted affected users via a post saying, ‘We recently discovered a technical error between May 18 and May 27 that automatically suggested a public audience when you were creating posts.
‘We apologise for this mistake. The problem has been fixed, and we changed the audience of any posts you made to what you had been using before, just in case. You can go to Activity Log to review the posts you made during this time.’
The site suggests its affected users to double check their posts to make sure their privacy settings are back to normal.
Facebook is trying to get back on track with its transparency as this has not been the best year for the social media site. In March, Facebook was found to be sharing personal data of 87 million users to controversial political researcher group Cambridge Analytica.
Since then CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced the US congress and is set to sit in front of the EU in the next month or so.
Facebook has recently confessed to sharing its user’s personal data with a number of Chinese technology companies including Huawei, Oppo, TCL and Lenovo. The social media giant says this was a part of a partnership to help the companies ‘recreate the Facebook service on their devices’.
