Facebook begins sending a message to users affected by photo leaks

Three days after informing developers of a bug that could have revealed private images of 6.8 million users, Facebook began Monday (17) to send a message. explain the problem to potentially affected users.

In the post, Facebook explains that the problem has no connection with the privacy settings of the user's post, but rather with a failure of a social network API that should : Allow some applications to access only publicly shared photos on the platform, but due to a failure, these applications had access not only to public shares, but also to images shared only with friends (for example, via Stories, for example) or even the images that the user downloaded but then decided not to publish on the social network, but which are stored on the servers as a draft. The message also shows a list of applications by which the user had access to his photos, revealing that he had already asked these companies to delete their images. servers all the contents of the photos related to the user, but he recommends to access Facebook applications to know the photos that each application had access.

Revealed initially on the 14th of this month, failure allowed access to these photos between the 13th and September 25 of this year. This means that any non-public photo posted after that date was not part of the gap, which, according to Facebook data, allowed 1,500 apps to access the entire picture. collection of images of 6.8 million users of the social network