Facebook has found itself the subject of another privacy scandal, this time involving privacy settings[1]. A glitch caused up to 14 million Facebook users to have their new posts inadvertently set to public, the company revealed Thursday.
The bug, which reportedly occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature, went live on May 18. Facebook told CNN, which first reported the issue[2], that it began rolling out a fix on May 22 that changed every post made by affected users to private, even if those users had intended to share it publicly. The bug was fully corrected by May 27.
Typically, if you share something to Facebook, the privacy settings of that post default to the last ones you used. For example, if you share a photo and set it only to be seen by your friends, then the next time you post something, Facebook will assume you want to share it with the same audience. Those affected by the bug had their default setting changed instead to "public." That could be potentially harmful if you shared sensitive information, like an address or phone number, assuming only friends could see it. Likewise, Facebook also allows you to exclude specific friends, like an ex-partner, from seeing your posts. If this glitch affected you, those people could have seen your posts.
Starting Thursday, affected users will see a message from Facebook encouraging them to "Please Review Your Posts" as well as a link to a list of what they may have shared during the glitch. Facebook also told CNN that users were able to manually change the share settings of their posts throughout the bug's duration. That means if you noticed that a post had inadvertently been shared publicly, you could have changed the audience.