We know that things are not going right for Facebook as a company at the moment. There have been privacy issues as well as data leak scandals coming out from Facebook almost every month since the last couple of years. Also, Facebook’s products are suffering various outages as well in recent times. Now, a new privacy issue has been revealed by the company themselves. However, Facebook is not so kind that they would tell everyone publicly about this issue.
Rather, they sent emails to the parents of kids enrolled on Facebook Messenger’s Kids app. In this e-mail, Facebook notified that they have found a bug in the Messenger for Kids app. This bug would allow friends of the kids to “create a group chat with [CHILD] and one or more of [FRIEND]’s parent-approved friends”. Now, if your kid uses the Messenger for Kids app then you would know how big an issue this is.
Basically, this allowed unauthorized users to create groups and add kids to those groups. Although nothing has been revealed, these groups could have been used to share child pornography and other content. Therefore, this bug is far more dangerous than Facebook claims it to be. Also, the company has said that they have “turned off this group chat” and also assures parents that “that group chats like this won’t be allowed in the future”
To understand this issue in simpler terms, we would have to understand how Messenger Kids works. So Messenger Kids has a permission system which allows parents to permit their kids to chat with people on a one-to-one basis or private chats. However, this got complicated when group chats were created.
Because not every parent allows every kid in the group to chat with their kids but still the kids would be able to chat with each other. This is the entire issue and Facebook says that group chats have been disabled for this reason.