Back in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw Facebook exposed as sharing private, personal data with developers that shouldn’t have access to that kind of information society was blessed for two reasons. One, because we finally got to see Mark Zuckerberg shed is human skin and reveal his robotic inner-workings and two, it also resulted in the social media platform implementing stricter privacy and developer policies. Great! So we never have to worry about this ever- oh and they’ve gone and done it all again. Come on, Facebook! You can’t keep making the same mistake!
In a recent blog post made by Facebook, it was revealed that developers have once again been given access to personal data ripped from Facebook accounts that have been inactive for 90 days or longer, which really isn’t that long. Worse still, the ability to not pull information from inactive accounts was one of the specific regulations put in place back in 2018.
While Facebook didn’t clarify how long this current issue had been going on before it was solved nor how many users were affected by the data breaches but it did confirm that 5000 developers were able to access private data they shouldn’t have been able to see. Oh, and they didn’t confirm which data had been shared but were very quick to confirm that users had “previously” authorised the data to be shared.
“We haven’t seen evidence that this issue resulted in sharing information that was inconsistent with the permissions people gave when they logged in using Facebook,” said the official statement. Despite this, the issue was apparently fixed a day after it was discovered.
Still, these kinds of mistakes shouldn’t be happening any more. We went through all of this already, Mark. Do not be sorry. Be better.
(Source: Engadget)