Facebook bug leaked private pictures of nearly 7 million users

Over the past few months, Facebook has regularly come into disrepute about privacy issues. Now CEO Mark Zuckerberg can add another problem. The social network was found to have made a security failure, giving remote apps easy access to photos of up to 6.8 million users.

Normally an app receives explicit permission from a user to view their photos. These are only pictures of a user’s timeline. But this error made all files available, including Facebook Stories and Marketplace images, as well as photos that a user had uploaded to the social medium, but not made public.

Three months ago

The incident took place three months ago. According to Facebook, third party apps had access to all photos for twelve days in September. That same month, Facebook also announced that it had been hacked and that the personal information of millions of users had become available on the streets. Hackers were able to capture names, telephone numbers, dates of birth and locations, among other things.

With this new problem, the photos of up to 6.8 million users were taken to the streets. This is not only a major privacy problem, but will also cause headaches for the 876 developers whose apps had access to all the material. They now have to find out which photos should and should not have been collected by their apps. It could be millions of pictures.

Facebook has announced that it is releasing a tool that will help developers find the photos. When exactly this app will be available, is not yet certain, although they are aiming for release next week. In addition, affected users will be notified and will be able to help track down the photos. The notification leads them directly to a place within the Help Center, where they can see if they have used apps that have been affected by the bug, writes Facebook. In addition, they can check which photos have ended up on the apps.