Facebook Hit With Another Data Leak – Exposes User Pictures

The bad news hitting social media networks continues with Facebook being hit with a data leak. People’s pictures may have been exposed.

The bad news continues to pour in for social media these days. Already, Google announced that it intends on shuttering Google+ sooner then expected following a second data leak. Earlier this month, Tumblr announced that it intended on automatically banning pornographic material only to have the initiative implode in the process.

Now, Facebook is once again in the spotlight over the data of their users. This time, it revolves around third party access to Facebook users’ pictures. From Quartz:

Up to 6.8 million people may have been affected by the latest bug discovered on Facebook. This time, the leak gave third-party apps access to users’ photos, Facebook said in a blog post.

The company fixed the issue, but outside developers had access to affected users’ photos that were uploaded to Marketplace or Facebook Stories between Sept. 13 and 25 this year. The bug also gave the apps, which normally just have access to photos shared on a user’s timeline, to photos that were uploaded, but not posted.

“We’re sorry this happened,” Tomer Bar, engineering director at Facebook, wrote in the post. The company will inform users who were potentially affected by the bug. You can do this yourself, by clicking on this link. Next week, the developers themselves will be able to check which of their apps’ users were affected. “We will be working with those developers to delete the photos from impacted users,” Bar wrote.

This leak is not your standard data leak. It doesn’t necessarily revolve around credit cards, social security numbers, or dates of births. Still, it’s not as though this leak is necessarily trouble-free. It really depends on what those photo’s are which could, in theory, be damaging to the user.

As it stands now, Facebook has already been rocked with a few privacy scandals. Back in September, Facebook got hacked, compromising 50 million accounts. That sparked a class action lawsuit.

Going further back, in April, Facebook was among multiple networks affected by the LocalBox data leak. Finally, Facebook faced global backlash and political heat over the data mining practices of Cambridge Analytica.

If anything, the end of 2018 is continuing to prove to be a brutal time of year for social networks in general. Now, we’re left to wonder what is next in all of this.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.

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