Facebook Bug Potentially Exposed Unshared Photos of Up 6.8 Million Users -- Update
December 14 2018 - 11:43AM
Dow Jones News
By Aisha Al-Muslim
Facebook Inc. said unshared pictures of up to 6.8 million users
may have been exposed by a software issue that granted app
developers access to the photos.
Up to 1,500 apps may have had improper access to photos,
including draft posts, from Sept. 13 to Sept. 25, Facebook said
Friday in a post on its developers' blog.
The company said it has since fixed the issue after an internal
team made the discovery.
"We're sorry this happened," wrote Tomer Bar, engineering
director at Facebook, in the blog post.
Early next week, Facebook will roll out tools for third-party
app developers to determine which people might have been affected
by the application program interface bug. Facebook said it will
work with the developers to delete affected users' photos.
The social-network company, which will notify people potentially
impacted through an alert on Facebook, also recommended users log
into any apps with Facebook authorization to check or update
photo-sharing permissions.
"When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos
on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people
share on their timeline," Mr. Bar wrote. "In this case, the bug
potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those
shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories. The bug also impacted
photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post."
The company's disclosure Friday comes as it faces a range of
regulatory inquiries into how it safeguards user privacy, treats
its competitors and controls access to its platform.
Many of those inquiries stemmed from the disclosure earlier this
year that an app developer improperly shared the data from as many
as 87 million Facebook users with data firm Cambridge Analytica,
which worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Last week, the U.K. Parliament released a trove of internal
Facebook emails that show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and other
executives pursued hard-nosed tactics to stifle competitors, as
well as considering a range of possibilities for monetizing the
massive amounts of data the company collected on its users.
The Wall Street Journal reported the documents show Facebook
gave some third-party developers special access to user data and
several years ago contemplated charging developers for data access,
a step that would have marked a shift away from the social-media
giant's policy of not selling that information.
In response, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post: "Like any
organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised
different ideas. Ultimately, we decided on a model where we
continued to provide the developer platform for free and developers
could choose to buy ads if they wanted. This model has worked
well."
Write to Aisha Al-Muslim at aisha.al-muslim@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 14, 2018 12:28 ET (17:28 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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