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Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018.
About 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting a message just to friends or smaller groups may have actually been sharing it widely with the general public due to a software bug, the company said Thursday.
A Facebook user’s post typically defaults to a preselected privacy setting. However a bug, which was active from May 18 to May 27, changed posts to automatically be public.
The posts were clearly marked as public, but users who were used to their privacy settings could have easily overlooked the public designation.
The company said it went back and recategorized the affected posts to the user’s default setting before the bug, and the problem has been fixed. In addition, Facebook will notify the 14 million users who could have been affected starting Thursday with a notification at the top of their news feeds.
“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement.
“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Egan said.
It’s another misstep in Facebook’s ongoing data privacy issues, spurred by revelations of a data leak that affecting as many as 87 million users.
The issue resulted from Facebook’s efforts to allow users to highlight items on their profiles, like photos. The featured items defaulted to public settings, which inadvertently made all posts by the user during the affected time period also default to public.
