Facebook: New leak exposes users' private photos

Even after all the scandal with the case of Cambridge Analytics, Facebook still has some privacy issues on its list, mostly related to leakage improper. This time it was the company itself who revealed that a bug in its photo API meant that some third-party applications could have access to private photos of 6.8 millions of users.

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The apps in question were authorized by users to have access to a limited amount of their photos, but due to this bug, many of them ended up having access to other images such as photos posted in Stories or even those that were uploaded on Facebook but were never posted, as the social network keeps a copy in the same way.  

However, this leak is not exactly recent. The photo exhibition took place between the 12th and 25th of September. The error was identified on the 25th and quickly resolved, but Facebook has waited until now to make this news public. Remembering that at the time the company was already dealing with another problem that was an attack hacker which resulted in access to personal data of more than 29 million people.

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Users who have been affected by this leak will receive a notification letting them know what happened. In response, Facebook promised that it would work with the developers to get these photos deleted, as they shouldn't have access to them. In all, there were about 1.500 third-party applications with access to the images, which resulted in 76 different developers involved. To find out if your account may have been affected, just go to the Help Center from Facebook.

It seems that Facebook is really accumulating more and more problems about the security of its users' data, and this could end up being even more negative for the company in the future. The subject of security is becoming more and more common and even Sundar Pichai, president of Google, needed to answer some questions this week about it.

Source: The Verge