The most popular online social media platform Facebook recognized a technical malfunction on Thursday due to which the default privacy settings of around 14 million users were changed, making their posts public even if they were determined to be private.
The Facebook users who thought they might be sharing their content privately only with their friends unintentionally shared their posts with everyone on the platform because of the software bug. The company yet again failed to keep the information of millions of users private.
The company blamed a software bug for this problem and stated that it went back and reclassified the affected posts to the user’s default setting before the bug, and the problem has now been resolved. Also, it has been mentioned that Facebook will notify and inform all the 14 million people starting Thursday with an alert in their notifications.
“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.,” chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement.
According to a Facebook’s statement, the bug affected users from May 18 to May 22, while the company was testing a new feature. However, by May 27, the company had changed the affected posts from a public setting back to a private. To counter the problems, Facebook has included a number of new privacy controls, and also a centralized page for privacy and security settings.
According to a survey by the Ponemon Institute, an independent research firm specializing in privacy and data protection, people’s trust in Facebook has decreased by 66 percent as a result of news stories in recent months. And now, the software bug has added to the criticism that Facebook has been facing, followed by its data privacy issues that accused it of being involved in data leak affecting as many as 87 million users.