The world’s largest social media platform just can’t seem to catch a break these days.
With the US government breathing down its neck and comparable investigations coming out of the European Union, Facebook’s privacy concerns, user data management, and the manipulation of its service to spread false news stories are just a few of the problems it has had to grapple with over the past year.
Now it seems like that once vaunted privacy setting was not so airtight after all.
A glitch on Facebook recently announced by the service but identified by multiple users prior to public notice being issued might have revealed posts once intended for private audience to the whole world.
Resource Mag recently reported that some 14 million users had the privacy settings on their posts switched from private to public in a bit of revelation that some might not have wanted.
Facebook, for its part, apologized for the mishap but did so only five days after it was first identified.
Not only did this omission miff a few users but also Facebook failed to tell everyone how they identified it in the first place outside of users noticing their formerly private posts suddenly running wild.
Of course, this delay in notifying users and subsequent lack of transparency is seen by many users as just another example of Facebook’s increasingly questionable role in the lives of many people. After all, if they aren’t going to keep private what you request they keep hidden what kinds of things is the service making public that you don’t know about?
A couple of legal experts have even pointed out that Facebook’s lack of disclosure could pose a legal problem for the company with US States Attorneys General as well as the Federal Trade Commission.
The moral of the story?
Don’t post something you don’t want people seeing. Aside from refraining from social media entirely, that’s the only guaranteed way to make sure what you want to keep private is kept so.
