Facebook Photo Privacy Fix of the Day

Facebook Photo Privacy Fix of the Day: Facebook says it has issued a fix for a bug in its reporting tool that exposed users’ private photos.

After reporting an inappropriate profile photo and checking the box for “nudity or pornography,” users were offered a selection of additional photos to report. Some of those were private photos that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible.

The bug came to Facebook’s attention after ZDNet reported that users had exploited it to download private photos of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and post them on an image sharing site.

Facebook issued the following statement, acknowledging the privacy problem and announcing the fix:

The bug was a result of one of our most recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one’s photos. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.

This news comes just a week after Facebook settled an FTC complaint and agreed to create a comprehensive privacy plan to protect user data.

[zdnet]