Following a very bad year for the company, it was discovered that a Facebook bug was exposing the private photos of up to 6.8 million users.
Facebook said that the bug in question allowed app developers to see photos users had uploaded, but never posted.
Third-party apps that had access to these hidden photos, where those that users had previously granted access to all of their public photos, through Facebook's API, explained Facebook developer Tomer Bar.
"Currently, we believe this may have affected up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers," he said. "We’re sorry this happened."
The problem happened as users sometimes give other apps the permission to access photos they share on the News Feed.
The bug here, apparently gave third-party developers the ability to not only see photos users had posted on their News Feed, but also pictures in other parts of the site.
This bug existed because Facebook stores copy of photos for three days for conveniency, if for example, users have uploaded a photo to its servers but didn't finish posting it.
The incident happened for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018.
Facebook is rolling out tools for app developers to allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug. Facebook is also working with those developers to remove the photos from impacted users.
While this error is relatively minor given by Facebook's size and scale, the social media is experiencing a very bad public relation over the years.
Most notably after the accusation of the company being involved in influencing the 2016 U.S. election, Facebook has also experienced the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal and numerous failed attempts to battle fake news.
Among some others, the social media giant has also experienced a massive data breach that exposed millions of personal information that include name, relationship status, search activity and recent location check-ins.
As for this photo bug, the worst thing about it is the amount of time Facebook took to disclose the incident.
The bug in question was live until September 25, 2018. But it took Facebook almost three months until December for it to notify the affected developers and users.
With each breakdown, Facebook risks losing credibility with both its audience and the advertisers whose spending generates most of the company’s revenue.
Although Facebook doesn’t appear to be losing a lot of users, some advertisers have been seeing data indicating that people are spending less time on the social network. This raises a concern about whether privacy breakdowns and problems with misinformation being spread on the services are taking a toll.
But it’s difficult to know how much Facebook’s problems have been affecting the service because its growth, particularly among younger people, had been slowing down, even before all of these problems began popping up.
