Facebook privacy flaw exposes Mark Zuckerberg

THE SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has a privacy flaw that has exposed Mark Zuckerberg's personal photos.

The internet is loving the news that the CEO of the social networking and people cataloguing spiderweb has been exposed in this way and it does not take much searching to find the images in question. We've seen them, and they are dull.

The bug, which involves complaining about a picture that is deemed inappropriate, has been around for a couple of weeks, and has been fixed by Facebook. However, for Zuckerberg the fix must have come too late.

Web site Hacker News was rather dismissive in its description of what happened and what it means to Facebook and its privacy. Posts in a forum on the web site show users discussing the flaw, with various degrees of disgust.

"Your bounty of $500 is quite low. I bet this whole incident did/does a lot more damage than that. And to be honest, if I had the choice between $500 and trolling Mark Zuckerberg by posting his private photos album online, I would probably chose the latter option," says one poster.

"If that doesn't prove that FB's developers aren't thinking about security, I don't know what would. Nobody who is in a culture of protecting security would even consider building this," adds another.

We have asked Facebook to respond.

Update
Facebook has responded to our request for comment, and confirmed that it has fixed the bug, and added that it was only live for a short amount of time.

"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. 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," said a spokesperson.

"The privacy of our user's data is a top priority for us, and we invest significant resources in protecting our site and the people who use it. We hire the most qualified and highly-skilled engineers and security professionals at Facebook, and with the recent launch of our Security Bug Bounty Program, we continue to work with the industry to identify and resolve legitimate threats to help us keep the site safe and secure for everyone." µ