Facebook has acknowledged a bug affecting 6.8 million users that gave Apps and their developers unauthorized access to Facebook user photos. Your personal photos and image uploads to Facebook, including those that were uploaded but never posted, may have been shared with app developers without your approval or knowledge. Was your account one of those 6.8 million?
Facebook is no stranger to controversy surrounding issues of privacy or security. In September, the company announced that it had experienced the largest known breach in its history: malicious actors managed to access personal information and records for 50 million Facebook user accounts. The scale of this breach is so large that new regulatory rules in Europe may result in Facebook incurring regulatory fines in excess of $1 Billion.
If you are wondering whether your account might be among those affected by this bug, there is a glimmer of good news: first, only 6.8 million accounts have been identified from among Facebook’s base of 1 billion users and, second, they have created a help article that will directly inform you if you were affected. To find out, make sure you are signed into Facebook in a browser, then click this link. If your account was compromised, the box in the center of the article will let you know. In my case, the account was unaffected:
This breach might lead you to question which other apps have access to your account or content. If that sounds like you, Facebook recommends its users double check their app sharing settings and confirm they have provided access to apps that need it. You can learn more about how to tidy up those settings by clicking here to see the Facebook FAQ on apps.
If you caught our article about smartphone lock screens, you might recall our previous discussion about the CIA Triad, an information security concept that refers to the principles of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. This most recent Facebook breach is an issue of confidentiality: unauthorized parties were able to gain access to sensitive information because of a bug in the Facebook code.
If you want to protect your information, you should take a few minutes to review the Facebook apps FAQ and restrict or remove app access to your account except for apps that are truly necessary. Remember: sharing access to your account requires trust that the app will never intentionally or unintentionally abuse the access you give them. If you are not certain they deserve that trust, they probably don’t.
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