Facebook has notified 14 million users about a bug that changed their privacy settings on status updates. The bug back in May had accidentally turned people’s private status updates to public without their knowledge or consent. Those affected found a notification from Facebook itself informing them about the bug and that it had been fixed days later.
Erin Egan, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer wrote a statement to TechCrunch, saying “We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. 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. 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.”
The bug was apparently active between May 18th and May 27th, and while the company had fixed the error on May 22nd, it took them five more days to revert the affected users’ privacy from public to their original setting.
