Facebook Says A Bug May Have Exposed The Unposted Photos Of Millions Of Users (buzzfeednews.com)

A day after hosting a pop-up store in New York City's Bryant Park to explain how privacy is the "foundation of the company," Facebook disclosed that a security flaw potentially exposed the public and private photos of as many as 6.8 million users to developers. From a report: On Friday, the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a blog post that it discovered a bug in late September that gave third-party developers the ability to access users' photos, including those that had been uploaded to Facebook's servers but not publicly shared on any of its services. The security flaw, which exposed photos for 12 days between Sept. 13 and Sept. 25, affected up to 1,500 apps from 876 developers, according to Facebook.

"We're sorry this happened," Facebook said in the post. "Early next week we will be rolling out tools for app developers that will allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug. We will be working with those developers to delete the photos from impacted users." Facebook has not yet responded to questions about whether company representatives staffing its privacy pop-ups yesterday were aware of this security flaw as they were meeting with reporters and customers to discuss privacy. Further reading: Facebook's lead EU regulator opens probe into data breach.

Comments

If you don't want it on the internet...

[tmshort]

Don't post it to the internet!

Re:If you don't want it on the internet...

[sacrilicious]

Don't post it to the internet!

Let's not lose sight of the fact that it's not "the internet" that completely screwed the pooch here, it is *specifically* Facebook, and their long history of leaks, "oopses", non-apologies, etc is going to go on because their whole business model is premised on gathering and selling private data, and they have even less decency than most.

My version of this advice would be "Choose a much better partner than Facebook in your quest for control over your data."

It wasn't even posted though...

[SuperKendall]

The thing is, these were images that were not technically posted.

It's interesting because Flickr has a feature that makes me wonder, where you can keep your whole camera roll uploaded - it's not made public, just stored.

Given this Facebook breach, keeping private photos like that on Flickr seems like it may be a bad idea as well... if you have anything you would mind being leaked anyway.

I wonder at what point private photo leaks will significantly start impacting politics (maybe they are already).

So they ask for your nudes..... and then...

[Puls4r]

https://www.independent.co.uk/...

So they want us to upload nude photos to stop revenge porn, then they allow access to all these other photos. Ho boy.

Re:Amateur Web Site at Best

[TWX]

A little secret for you, the bulk of IT is run by beginners who not only overstate their technical skills, they also personally overvalue their technical skills. In short, they don't really understand how poor their skills are.

Now consider that as a basic starting point for a developed platform, then factor it in with the software running on that platform, for the higher-level protocols that let that software communicate, and for the staff that maintain the systems, and one can see why breaches are so damn common.

Re:Accidentally on Purpose

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Journalists should follow the money, for people looking to sell fb short, or waiting for it to drop as a buying opportunity.

I first realized this when, the same week Taser went public, suddenly there was a big story about tasers killing people.