A new Facebook bug has reportedly set the sharing settings of millions of users to ‘public.’
On Thursday, Facebook has asked its 14 million users to check the posts they made from May 18 to May 22. According to the social media giant, a certain Facebook bug has changed the settings of their accounts, making private posts public.
“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,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement.
“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.”
The mistake allegedly happened while the company was working on redesigning the way public user profiles are being displayed.
By default, posts made by users are set to public. However, Facebook users can limit who sees their posts through the audience selector feature. Also, users have the option to make their content visible to their friends or sub-group of friends.
Apparently, the Facebook bug ignored these user preferences and just set the default audience for every post to public.
“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Egan went on to say. “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.”
Facebook has reportedly stopped the bug on May 22 but was not able to restore the proper privacy settings until May 27.
This new issue follows other privacy problems that the social media network faces. One of which includes the data-sharing agreement that Facebook allegedly had with Chinese device manufacturers.
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