B to C

14 Million Facebook Posts May Have Gone Public By Mistake

Guest ColumnistJune 7, 20181 min read

For a few days last month, FastCompany reported, a software bug caused 14 million Facebook users’ default setting for sharing content to be “public,” meaning that some of their posts intended to be kept private were accessible to anyone on the internet.

Users who were affected by the bug, which appeared when the company was testing new features between May 18 and May 22, will get a notification to review their posts from that period to make sure they actually wanted them to be public and hadn’t simply accepted the changed default setting, said FastCompany.

In the meantime, Facebook has set any public posts from that period to users’ previous default settings, meaning that users who intended to make posts public will need to reset them to be globally accessible.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, in a statement. “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.”

More here.

Guest Columnist

Capitol Communicator and sponsors host various guest postings on topics of interest to the advertising, marketing, public relations and media professional community that Capitol Communicator serves.