Social network giant, on Friday announced that a software bug affected nearly 7 million of the platform users, exposing a broader set of photos to app developers than those intended.
According to the social network giant, about 6.8 million users who granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos, may have exposed their photos for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018 before the bug was fixed.
"Our internal team discovered a photo API bug that may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos," Facebook said in a statement.
"We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018," the social network giant added.
Though Facebook said the software bug might have affected users who granted permission to 1,500 apps built by 876 developer, that doesn't mean that the photos were actually seen by anyone.
Normally, when a Facebook user gives an app permission to access their photos, the app will only have access to photos people share on their timeline. However, this software bug gave developers not only access to their photos shared on Marketplace or on Facebook Stories, but also those that were uploaded on Facebook but the user didn't posting it due to technical reasons or some sort.
2018 has been for a rocky year for the social network giant, from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to data breaches, failures to tackle political interference and other privacy scandals. All these led to congressional hearings regarding the company's failure to safe guard its 2.27 billion users data.
Facebook is also set to face another probe by an international committee consisting of 22 members from 7 countries. This panel consist of elected members from the parliament of Argentina, Canada, Lativia, Singapore, Brazil, the vice president of policy for Europe, the Middle east and Africa (EMEA), and members of the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Despite Facebook's scandals, its massive user base hasn't shrinked, though growth has slowed.
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