Facebook
has fixed a bug that briefly allowed users to access others users'
private photos, even if their profile pages were locked down. The bug
was spotted in the site's tool that allows users to report offensive
content. However, clicking on a user's profile pictures, then reporting
it to Facebook as 'nudity or other inappropriate content', prompted the
site to show other photos from the user's account and ask whether they
were offensive as well.
According to reports, the bug was first
spotted by the reader forums for BodyBuilding.com. The discussion was
reportedly removed from the website later, however, users were found
commenting about the glitch in other comment threads.
Facebook was quick to respond to the bug
and issued a statement soon after it was highlighted. Acknowledging the
glitch, Facebook said that very few users were affected by it.
Facebook, however, did not reveal precise number of users affected.
A number of Facebook users have their
profile pages locked. Only profile picture data is normally visible for
display. Users who exploited this flaw reported a profile picture as
'nudity or pornography', which further directed to the reporting tool to
display the images.
Some private photos of Facebook chief
executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg were also accessed with this
exploit. A Facebook spokesperson said
that a bug was “discovered in one of our reporting flows” that allowed
users to report multiple instances of inappropriate images, posts, or
other content. The bug was discovered in “one of our most recent code
pushes”, but pointed out that the code was live “for a limited period of
time”.
The bug comes days after the Federal
Trade Commission asked Facebook to be more transparent about its privacy
policies. Zuckerberg asserted
that his company had made “a bunch of mistakes” on the privacy front
and vowed to overhaul its policy, giving users more control of their
information on the social networking site.
In a detailed blog post on the social
networking site, Facebook founder and chief executive says that he had
founded the company on an idea that people are willing to share and
connect with others, but “to do this everyone needs complete control
over who they share with at all times”.
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