Facebook Bug Reveals Private Photos to the Public

PC Magazine reports that a recent glitch on Facebook made it possible for people to publicly view photos that members had designated as private.

According to the report, the issue was discovered by Byron Ng, a Canadian computer technician, who posted code on his blog in January that he said allowed people to access private Facebook photos. He posted updated code again in late February. “It does not let you view all their pictures, but only the last album in which they tagged themselves in,” he wrote.

Facebook said yesterday that they found the bug on Monday and fixed it immediately. The article said that the problems emerged a week after Facebook introduced new privacy options that allowed users to pick and choose which friends or networks saw photos posted to their profiles or photo albums.

Facebook is under intense scrutiny lately, due mostly to its meteoric rise on the social networking scene, and its bumbled Beacon launch, which was an attempt at monetizing the service that also managed to alienate many of its users due to its intrusiveness. Facebook also offers a slew of mobile options, including an iPhone-formatted page and a photo-capable application written for the BlackBerry.

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