It doesn’t seem to let up, does it?

Facebook is amazingly having to cope with yet another user data scandal after it emerged that as many as 14m users may have had private messages publicly shared.

Re/code reports that a bug that was present for ten days from May 18th 2018 accidentally elevated posts that had been intended only for friends or small groups to ‘public’ – without ever warning users.

Essentially posts were erroneously being re-set to ‘public’ even after a different selection had been made in the ‘audience selector’ tool. It has not yet been divulged how many of the 14m affected users actually succumbed to the glitch.

When it rains, it pours

The company has said it will shortly begin informing those who are believed to have been affected. Any posts whose status was changed by the bug have now had their proper settings restored, although users are being urged to check any posts made within the timeframe.

“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,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement. “We’d like to apologise for this mistake.”

In the greater scale of things this incident isn’t a huge disaster. But arriving as it does on the back of the highest profile data security disaster of modern times, it can only further erode confidence in the platform.

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