Facebook Digs Itself Into a Deeper Hole After New Privacy Flap

We came to Facebook for the friends, but what it seems we are staying for are spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse. The social network, which is already besieged by a string of privacy scandals and for not doing enough to curb misinformation, hate speech and ad discrimination on the platform, said on Friday that a bug in its code exposed 6.8 million users' private photos to developers for 12 days in September (from 12th to 25th), right around the time Facebook disclosed another massive data breach that exposed as many as 50 million accounts to hackers. Worryingly, also included were photos from people's stories as well as photos that people uploaded but chose not to post (because Facebook saves a copy anyway for a period of three days), read the blog post, adding it will be "working with those developers to delete the photos from impacted users." Facebook also estimates that up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers may have inappropriately accessed people's pictures.

Facebook's ad campaign targeting fake news (Image: Wired)

While Facebook did not say whether the photo API bug was abused by third-party app developers, or that if developers even knew they had access to more information than what they were supposed to, the fact that it took over two months to report the issue not only raises significant transparency concerns (a la Google+), but also shows repeated failure on Facebook's part to secure user data. "We're sorry this happened," wrote Tomer Bar, the company's engineering director, on the post, but it's telling that the company doesn't even care at this point. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, weeks after Cambridge Analytica data scandal, wrote a "heartfelt" apology, stating, "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you." The big question, after a series of questionable privacy flaps, is if it really does.