Facebook Bug Changed Privacy Settings of Up to 14 Million Users

SAN FRANCISCO— Facebook has been on struggle for various months the perception that it did not do enough to protect the public privacy. On Thursday, The Company has again stated that they were failed to keep the information of millions of users private.

As for over 14 million users of Facebook who thought they were making the private posts last month that only a small portion of people could see, but in fact, that was making public posts which could be seen by anyone.

The Facebook blamed a software for this piece of bug. Well, the company has not say it yet how they found the bug, or how they knew that the bug was only limited to 14 million people, why not all the entire Facebook users.

In a statement of Facebook, they said that the bug affected users from the May 18 to May 22 while the company was testing a new feature. By May 27, the company had successfully changed the affected posts from public setting back to the private.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement. “We have fixed this issue, and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and are asking them to review any posts they made during that time.”

For over few months, Facebook executives have repeatedly been forced to apologize to their users for failing to protect their privacy.

Trust in Facebook has been fallen around 66 percent as a result of these months, according to a survey by the Ponemon Institute, an independent research firm which is specializing in privacy and data protection.

Norman Sadeh, Co-Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Privacy Engineering Program, said that although facebook survived temporary losses of trust from the public in the past, the recent scandals appears to be taking their toll on the social media company.

In response to the problems, The Facebook has added several of new privacy features controls, as well as the centralized page for privacy and security settings. Mr. Sadeh said the new settings were still confusing.

One of the most key privacy of Facebook is that it lets the people to decide an audience for their posts. Someone can, for example, share a post with only a limited group of family and friends, or decide to make a post public so that anyone can see, including those who are not logged in to the facebook.

Facebook and other companies must improve their approach to privacy and develop a high setting that are easier to use and more aligned with what users want, “People should probably refrain from sharing too much sensitive information with these platforms,” Mr.Sadeh Said.