Facebook is experiencing one of its worst years, and new scandals have not yet appeared. Facebook has just revealed that a bug in the API photos of its platform gave application developers too much access to images of up to 6.8 million users. “We have solved the problem but, due to this error, some third-party applications may have had access to a larger set of photos than usual, ” they say in a statement.
This new security breach of the social network led by Mark Zuckerberg would have been open for twelve days, between September 13 and 25 of this 2018. It has affected Facebook users who have used the network login and have granted permission to third-party applications to access their photos.
This Security Breach Affected Unpublished Photos
As they explain in the text that has announced the serious error, unpublished photos would also have been exposed. These images are those that are uploaded by users to the social network per, once loaded, they are not published.
This may be due to a loss of data connection or simply that, at the last moment, you decided not to proceed with the publication. In these cases, as Facebook explains, they store a copy of that photo so that the user who decides to continue with the publication has it when he returns to the application.
At present, according to the data handled by the social giant, it is estimated that up to 6.8 million users would have been affected by this problem and up to 1,500 applications built by 876 developers. The applications affected by this error were those that Facebook approved to access the photos API and that, as we pointed out before, users had authorized to access their photos.
From next week onwards Facebook will implement tools for application developers that will allow them to determine which users of their application could be affected by this error.