Facebook shuts down security hole that let adults view private photos of underage users

Facebook shuts down security hole that let adults view private photos of underage users

Famous social network site, Facebook, has planned to shut down the security loop hole that let anyone view private photos of other Facebook users. This security hole was used by adults
to view pictures of underage users without their knowledge.

The social network allows people to join the network if they are aged 13 or over. However, many schoolchildren, who were aged 11, create Facebook accounts lying about their age. The issues
arose after Facebook made an update to their system in November, which lets users to view others’ private photos reporting their profile picture as pornographic.

However, it was only fixed when the same happened to the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. His personal pictures started circulating on the internet, which included a photo of his meeting
President Obama and some photos with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan.

If a user’s profile picture was reported as pornographic, Facebook would allow them to see the user’s other private pictures. The idea behind this action was that other pictures could
be reported as pornographic too. For now, it is unknown how many peoples’ private pictures had been viewed as a result of the flaw.

Facebook stated, “Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously. The bug allowed
anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos.”

The social network added, “This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system,
and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.”

Last week, Zuckerberg admitted that they have made a bunch of mistakes related to the privacy of Facebook users. However, the Facebook team is now looking into these matters.

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Dec 10 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry