Facebook Bug Changes Privacy Settings of 14M Users

Heads up, Facebook users: Some of the posts you made last month may have had a much larger audience than you realized.

The social network on Thursday said it recently discovered a software bug, which, for several days last month, changed the suggested audience of all new posts to “public.” Facebook’s audience selector tool usually remembers the audience you shared with the last time you posted something (public, friends, friends except…, or only me) and suggests the same audience when you share again.

The error occurred while Facebook was building a new way to share featured items, such as photos, on your profile. Featured items are always public, but someone accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts, not just featured items, public.

The bug was live between May 18 and May 27. During that time, some 14 million people made public posts on the social network, many of them likely believing they were sharing with just friends.

“We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a statement emailed to PCMag Thursday. “To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before, and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”

Upon discovering the bug, Facebook changed the audience of affected posts from public to whatever audience the person had been using before the error occurred. The company halted the glitch on May 22, but didn’t get all the posts changed back until May 27.

If you’re among the 14 million people affected by this bug, you’ll see a notification about it when you log into Facebook. The notification (pictured at the top of this article) contains a link to a page where you can review your affected posts.

This new privacy gaffe follows revelations that Facebook offered dozens of device makers —including Chinese vendors Lenovo, Oppo, TCL, and Huawei Technologies—special access to user data. According to The New York Times, those data-sharing agreements let the vendors access “vast amounts” of Facebook users’ personal information, including in some cases, the data of users’ friends who “believed they had barred any sharing.”