Steps On How to check Your Facebook Photos Were Leaked due to the Facebook Photo Bug

In recent times, Facebook has been hauled over the coals not once but twice for the breaches having to do a lot with the privacy of the users’ data. According to a blog report by Tomer Bar, the Engineering Director at Facebook, FB team has come across a Photo bug in the platform’s photo API. 

This exposed 6.8 million users’ private pictures to unauthorized third-party apps. You can click here to check if your account was affected and follow the instructions mentioned.

You can read further to know more about what exactly casued this issue and how can you prevent this in the future.

What’s This Facebook Photo Bug?

Here is an explanation about how this happened. People who logged in Facebook and granted permission to some third-party apps to access their photos are the prey of this breach of the Facebook photo bug.

These 3rd Party apps legitimately got access to a finite set of photos, but this bug allowed them to get access to those photos that they were not supposed to see.

These photos include the ones from the Facebook stories as well as the pictures that a user uploaded on Facebook but never posted it. This is quite frightening. The affected users have no idea who might have their photos now.

The incident of the Facebook photo bug happened on the dates ranging from 12th September to 25th September.

Yes, this means that the bug was alive and kickin’ for 12 days.

Facebook briefed about the exposure to TechCrunch. The breach was discovered on 25th September. They later informed about this to the European Union’s privacy watchdog the Office Of The Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) on 22nd November.

Note: Highlighting a small flashback to the privacy breach that happened a couple of months ago. Facebook hackers triumphed over the personal details of 30 million Facebook users.

This allowed them to dive deep into the complete profile of the people who came into their line of fire.

On a side note: Google+ is getting discontinued because they exposed the data of more than 500 thousand of their users. Google has taken the decision to close down Google Plus in August of 2019. So if you have any data there, it’d be good to back it up or download it.

oming back to the latest leak, the users who were affected by the Facebook photo bug will receive a notification that warns them. The warning is of informing them that their photos may be exposed inappropriately.

People who receive these alerts can check on the help center to see if they really used any of the apps that were bug-affected.

Facebook also mentions that it will be working with 876 developers who built the 1500 apps. These apps are the very ones responsible for this unauthorized access. The team will be deleting the copies of the photos that they were not meant to access.

The Clarification for Facebook Photo Bug

Facebook also said the photo bug is an outcome of an error within Facebook login and photo’s API that allowed developers to access the users’ photos within their app.

These issues have barely to do anything with the hackers, but the problems have rooted from the errors in the Facebook itself.

Tomer Bar is requesting people to log into the apps with which they shared their Facebook photos and check which photos those apps have access to.

You can click here to check if you are among the users affected by the Facebook photo bug and follow the instructions as mentioned on that page.