If Facebook’s ongoing privacy woes become any more regular, clocks may soon become obsolete.
This week’s (first?) news about the increasingly leak-prone company (or increasingly transparent company when it comes to leaks?) has to do with an accident.
Scratch that. What do you call an ongoing accident? Perhaps the correct answer, is Facebook.
The company has been accidentally sending data from apps that run on their platform to testers (people who use beta versions of the apps to identify bugs), instead of developers (who write the apps and employ those testers).
Facebook sent out an email to notify affected app developers, informing them that they had “mistakenly sent the last weekly email summary to your Testers, in addition to the usual group of Admins, Analysts and Developers who get updates. Testers were only able to see the high-level summary information in the email, and were not able to access any other account information; if they clicked “View Dashboard” they did not have access to any of your Facebook Analytics information.”
The company confirmed that 3% of their apps were affected by the flub. Although they haven’t provided figures, last year Facebook was home to more than 1 million apps, sites, and bots.
While the data leaked in this incident lacks the severity of other recent revelations, it’s still a black eye for a company that has been increasingly attracting the wrong kind of conversation from government and privacy advocates.
Read more about the story here.
