Facebook has been in the news a lot recently over its privacy practises and protection of user information, however, today it was an unintended flaw in the privacy system that allowed Facebook hackers, or perhaps everyday users, to 'make public' the home photos of Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg.
The flaw, now fixed, had supposedly been live and well-known for several weeks before being patched by Facebook, quite a serious amount of time to be in breach of user privacy rights. The flaw involved reporting public profile pictures as "nudity or pornography", opening up the doors to request to report more, private photos from that same user, which would then be displayed as smaller thumbnails for all to see.
A Facebook spokesperson stated "The bug was a result of one of our most recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time ... not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one's photos." A very reasonable statement, had 'not all content' included amongst it, the home photos of the Facebook owner and, 'limited period of time' been several weeks; a reality that would leave doubts in the minds of most, as to the firm's priorities when it comes to privacy and security of personal information; despite this, the spokesperson did go on to say "Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed."
To make matters worse, when asked for permission by various sites to display the leaked photos, Facebook stated that as the pictures were now in the the public domain, it would not be pursuing copyright infringement claims; we ask ourselves what this could mean for other users on Facebook whose pictures were leaked and we expect, perhaps, to be seeing a few lawsuits against Facebook popping-up over the next few months.
Nice chicken by the way, Mark.