Facebook’s privacy violations and data leaks at this point are becoming so frequent that the company might want to consider scheduling regular news conferences to discuss the latest and greatest security facepalms.
The latest: Facebook accidentally set the default data sharing settings for 14 million users to “public” for all new posts. In short, what was meant to be posted to a circle of friends was posted to the internet, and the world at large.
“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer.
The error occurred from May 18-22. Users whose posts were publicly exposed are being notified.
Facebook has also been in the news recently for sharing data with Chinese manufacturers (one of whom has been called a national security risk by the U.S. Government), mobile phone manufacturers (not the least of which includes Apple, Samsung, and Blackberry), data mining organizations like Cambridge Analytica (accused of affecting the most recent presidential election), and creating potentially fictitious updates to encourage users to comply with non GDPR-friendly terms of service.
Read more about the public post problem here.
