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A software bug meant millions of Facebook users may have unknowingly posted private information to the public, the company has warned.

The glitch set a user’s post to be shared to "everyone", even if a user had previously chosen a more restricted option, such as “friends of friends”.

“We’d like to apologise for this mistake,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s head of privacy.

Users who may have been affected will be notified on the site’s newsfeed.

"We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts,” Ms Egan said.

"We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time.

"To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before - and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologise for this mistake."

The glitch was active between 18 and 22 May, a spokeswoman added, but it took the site until 27 May to switch posts back to private - or whatever the user had typically used before the bug became apparent.

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Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook's chief executive

What did the bug do?

When users post to Facebook, there is a menu option that dictates who sees that post. If the user chooses public, anyone can view that post.

The other options limit the audience, with most users typically posting updates that reach their friends.

Facebook remembers what setting you last chose and automatically selects it the next time you make a post.

However, between 18 and 22 May this year, the bug would set posts to “public” even if the user had, in the previous post, chosen something more private.

If the user did not notice the setting had changed, they may have posted something publicly that was not intended for that wider audience.

Facebook said it estimates 14 million people did so - and so has started notifying users. In the meantime, it has reverted the audience for any affected posts to whatever setting the user had selected previously.

More mishaps

While relatively minor compared to recent issues facing the company, the glitch is another embarrassing slip-up for a firm already under heavy fire over privacy concerns.

This week, it has been answering questions about the nature of data-sharing deals with handset makers including Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE.

Those affected by this latest blunder will be shown a graphical notification soon, with the chance to review what posts may have been posted publicly by mistake.

A spokesperson told the BBC this method of communication might become more frequent as the network works on ways to be more transparent with users.</s>The bug was active from May 18 to May 27 and changed users’ privacy settings without them knowing.The company said the problem has been fixed, and Facebook will notify the 14 million users who could have been affected starting Thursday.

About 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting a message just to friends or smaller groups may have actually been sharing it widely with the general public due to a software bug, the company said Thursday.

A Facebook user’s post typically defaults to a pres-elected privacy setting. However, a bug that was active from May 18 to May 27 changed posts to automatically be public.

The posts were clearly marked as public, but users who were used to their privacy settings could have easily overlooked the public designation.

The company said it went back and recategorized the affected posts to the user’s default setting before the bug, and the problem has been fixed. In addition, Facebook will notify the 14 million users who could have been affected starting Thursday with an alert in their notifications.

“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Egan said.

It’s another misstep in Facebook’s ongoing data privacy issues, spurred by revelations of a data leak that affected as many as 87 million users.

The issue resulted from Facebook’s efforts to allow users to highlight items on their profiles, such as photos, the company said.

The featured items defaulted to public settings, which inadvertently made all posts by the user during the affected time period also default to public.</s>Facebook acknowledged Thursday a software glitch that changed the settings of some 14 million users, potentially making some posts public even if they were intended to be private.

The news marked the latest in a series of privacy embarrassments for the world’s biggest social network, which has faced a firestorm over the hijacking of personal data on tens of millions of users and more recently for disclosures on data-sharing deals with smartphone makers.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement that the company recently “found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts.”

Facebook said this affected users posting between May 18 and May 27 as it was implementing a new way to share some items such as photos.

That left the default or suggested method of sharing as public instead of only for specific users or friends.

Facebook said it corrected the problem on May 22 but was unable to change all the posts, so is now notifying affected users.

“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Egan said.

“To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before — and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”

Facebook confirmed earlier this week that China-based Huawei — which has been banned by the US military and is a lightning rod for cyberespionage concerns — was among device makers authorized to see user data in agreements that had been in place for years.

Facebook has claimed the agreements with some 60 device makers dating from a decade ago were designed to help the social media giant get more services into the mobile ecosystem.

Nonetheless, lawmakers expressed outrage that Chinese firms were given access to user data at a time when officials were trying to block their access to the US market over national security concerns.

The revelations come weeks after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in Congress about the hijacking of personal data on some 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy working on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. – AFP</s>(CNN Money) — For a period of four days in May, about 14 million Facebook users around the world had their default sharing setting for all new posts set to public, the company revealed Thursday.

The bug, which affected those users from May 18 to May 22, occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature.

After Facebook employees discovered the bug, the company went back and changed the privacy settings for all posts shared by those 14 million users during that time.

Facebook changed every post by those users during the affected time period to private, including posts that people may have meant to share publicly. The company told CNN it took five days to make those changes.

Affected Facebook users will get a notification on the app or website starting Thursday. They’ll see a message from Facebook urging users to “Please Review Your Posts” and a link to a list of what they shared on Facebook while the bug was active.

Facebook posts typically default to the last “audience” a post was shared with, such as family members, friends, or friends except their boss. That default was changed to public for the 14 million users, but if affected users noticed, they could have manually switched the setting themselves.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer. “We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before — and they could still choose their audience just as they always have.”

A Facebook spokesperson said the notification is the start of new proactive and transparent way for the company to handle issues going forward.</s>A bug was live from May 18 to May 27 where about 14 million Facebook users around the world had their default sharing setting for all new posts set to public, the company revealed. After Facebook employees discovered the bug, which occurred while the tech giant was testing a new feature, the company claimed workers went back and changed the privacy settings for all posts shared by those 14 million users during that time.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before — and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Erin Egan, chief privacy officer of Facebook, told Fox News.

Affected Facebook users received a notification on the app or website starting Thursday. The message from Facebook urged users to “Please Review Your Posts,” and gave them a link to a list of what they shared on Facebook while the bug was active.

The news followed a recent furor over Facebook’s sharing of user data — oversharing, in the eyes of many critics.

Facebook also said Thursday it would end its data partnership with Huawei by the end of this week following a backlash over the Chinese phone maker’s access to Facebook user data.

Huawei claimed Wednesday it neither collected nor stored Facebook user data, after the social media giant acknowledged it shared such data with Huawei and other manufacturers.

Huawei, a company flagged by U.S. intelligence officials as a national security threat, was the latest device maker at the center of a fresh wave of allegations over Facebook’s handling of private data.

The development marked the latest major blunder for Facebook since allegations emerged in March that a Trump-affiliated political consultancy firm, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users to influence elections.

Fox News’ Shira Bush and The Associated Press contributed to this report.</s>Facebook disclosed a new privacy blunder on Thursday in a statement that said the site accidentally made the posts of 14 million users public even when they designated the posts to be shared with only a limited number of contacts.

The mixup was the result of a bug that automatically suggested posts be set to public, meaning the posts could be viewed by anyone, including people not logged on to Facebook. As a result, from May 18 to May 27, as many as 14 million users who intended posts to be available only to select individuals were, in fact, accessible to anyone on the Internet.

“We have fixed this issue, and, starting today, we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in the statement. “To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before–and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”

The statement said that Facebook technicians stopped automatically making private posts public on May 22, but that it took them another five days to fully restore privacy settings for all the affected posts.

The bug occurred as Facebook developers were creating a new way to share photos and other featured items in user profiles. In the process, the developers accidentally suggested all new posts be set to public, rather than just the featured items. Normally, Facebook makes it possible for users to share photos, text, or video only with family members, work colleagues, or other specially designated contacts and preventing anyone else from seeing the content. The bug caused such posts to be viewable to anyone.

Thursday’s disclosure comes three months after The New York Times reported that in 2016, Facebook provided personal data for more than 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, a political firm with ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The social network has since worked to assure users and politicians around the world that it will give users more control over who gets access to their posts, contact lists, and other personal data.

Starting Thursday, Facebook started notifying the 14 million users affected by the bug that some of their private posts had been made public. Facebook is also referring users to this privacy basics page.

“We've heard loud and clear that we need to be more transparent about how we build our products and how those products use your data—including when things go wrong,” Thursday’s statement read. “We expect that this kind of on-platform notification is something which people might see more of over the coming months as we try and do more (and better) to detect and fix issues before they affect people's experience.”</s>Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have got some explaining to do.

Facebook is at the heart of another privacy scandal, one that affects more than 10 million of its users. WIRED reports that a bug in the framework of one of the world’s most popular social media sites caused 14 million users’ private posts to go public. According to WIRED, the malfunction took place when Facebook was testing a new feature on May 18. A rep from the platform told CNN that they started repairing the glitch on May 22 and that all of the public posts were reset to private on May 27.

For each new post, Facebook uses your previous privacy settings unless you change them. So if all your previous posts were private they will continue to be that way until you adjust it. It also allows you to pick who you want to see your post. But the people affected by Facebook’s most recent privacy error had their private setting changed to public without their knowledge. So, friends who they didn’t want to see their posts would have had the ability to see them until the bug was fixed.

The good news here is that, during the glitch, affected users had the ability to manually change the settings on each post. But how often does the average Facebook user check their privacy settings, especially if they’re accustomed to their posts being private?

Facebook has a damage control procedure in place. As WIRED notes, affected users will be notified by Thursday and each will be encouraged to review their posts. Facebook will present them with a list of posts that they made during the malfunction to make this process easier.

The bug occurred while Facebook was testing a feature called “Featured Items” that allows users to spotlight certain posts on their page. “Featured Items” are only meant to affect public posts but Facebook accidentally applied it to all user posts, Techcrunch reports.

Facebook has been in hot water about their policies as they relate to privacy and the protection of user data. In May, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the European Parliament to answer questions related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other issues. As The Verge notes, Cambridge Analytica is an analytics and data-mining firm that has been accused of using Facebook as a tool to access user data and influence the 2016 US presidential election. According to The Verge, the strategies that Analytica reportedly used are violations of Facebooks Terms of Service but the company denies that they did anything wrong.</s>A software bug changed the privacy settings of about 14 million Facebook users without their knowledge, causing messages intended for friends or smaller groups to be shared widely with the general public, the company said Thursday.

The company said the bug, which was active from May 18 to May 27, has been fixed. Facebook said it will begin to notify affected users Thursday by posting a notification at the top of their news feeds, CNBC reported.

"We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts," chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement. "We'd like to apologize for this mistake."

The issue resulted from Facebook's efforts to allow users to highlight items on their profiles, like photos. The featured items defaulted to public settings, which inadvertently made all posts by the user during the affected time period also default to public.



It's another misstep in Facebook's ongoing data privacy issues, spurred by revelations of a data leak that affecting as many as 87 million users.</s>Facebook today revealed that a bug last month set some users’ suggested privacy settings for posts to public. The company estimates that 14 million users were affected, and is notifying users of the bug starting today.

In the status update box at the top of a user’s News Feed, he or she has the option to select who they would like to share their post with — “public,” “friends,” or “friends except for.” Even if a user had set their default sharing option to “friends,” the bug changed the setting for affected users to “public.” That means if an eagle-eyed user didn’t catch the bug, they likely shared some status updates publicly on Facebook that they meant to share only with friends.

The bug affected posts shared between May 18 and May 27, though Facebook started rolling out a fix on May 22. A statement attributed to Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan read “we recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before – and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”

According to TechCrunch, the bug was caused by a new tool Facebook is building called featured items that “highlights photos and other content [on a user’s profile]. These featured items are publicly visible, but Facebook inadvertently extended that setting to all new posts from those users.”

Considering that Facebook has nearly 2.2 billion users worldwide, the number of affected users is small. And while the bug was only in effect for a few days, it’s an example of how many different settings users have to be aware of on Facebook. If they don’t check to make sure that they have the correct settings before hitting “post,” they may be sharing sensitive information with users they didn’t intend to.

The tweet below shows the notification users will be receiving. Facebook will also flag for the user which posts they shared between May 18 and May 27, and will show them what the privacy setting was on that post. That way, users can reset a post that was inadvertently set to public back to being shared just with friends if they would like.

VentureBeat has reached out to Facebook for more information about who may have been affected and will update this story if we hear back.</s>San Francisco: Facebook Inc. had a software bug for 10 days in May that set the audience for people’s posts to “public,” even if they had intended to share them just with friends, or a smaller audience.

The bug affected as many as 14 million people, the company said. Facebook will soon start individually informing the people who were affected by the bug.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement. Facebook has fixed the privacy settings for posts during that time, and will let users review any affected content to make sure the audience is what they wanted, she said.

It’s the latest in a series of revelations about Facebook’s privacy lapses. The company is currently facing criticism from Congress for data partnerships with Chinese companies. Facebook is also still dealing with fallout from a March revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, was able to obtain information on as many as 87 million people without their consent.
Facebook reports an error in privacy settings that has affected 14 million users.