Privacy Flaw Exposes User Photos on Facebook

The Washington Post reports on a recently discovered Facebook bug that could have breached the privacy of users. The bug, which has now been fixed, allowed people to easily access all the wall updates and photos of their Facebook friends regardless of the privacy settings.

Before publishing details of the bug the Washington Post reported them to Facebook. Now that it’s been fixed the Post has revealed that the exploit involved deactivating your account then immediately reactivating it. An unlikely sequence of events but one that could be easily repeated if you were aware of the exploit.

Facebook said:

While the scenario for the bug to work was a rare use case in the account reactivation process, we’re always concerned with any potential breach of user privacy. We worked quickly to address the reported bug and it was resolved within a few hours late last night.

The lesson is clear: never post anything on the internet unless you want to risk your Mum seeing it. Even with the best privacy policies, settings and procedures in the world, mistakes happen.