Too many people are trying to keep their things private and Facebook keeps screwing that up.
According to CNET, Facebook accidentally leaked more than 14 Million users posts – or rather, they were private and they got switched to Public.
This happened by a glitch that flipped the privacy settings to public, not for posts that were already out there, but posts that were being made after it was switched. They have now remedied the flip, but those posts could have been seen by people that weren’t supposed to see them, which is a violation of privacy in it’s own right.
There was a statement/notification that went out from Facebook saying the following:
“NAME OF USER, we recently discovered a technical error between May 18 and 27 that automatically suggested a public audience when you were creating posts. We apologize 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 review the posts you made during this time.”
Furthermore, the Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan released this statement, quoted by CNET:
“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before – and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”
Hey Mark Zuckerberg, you’re gonna start to lose users if you don’t clean things up!