Facebook on Thursday said it had begun alerting 14 million people about a privacy settings bug on its platform that automatically suggested posting publicly when they were creating posts. The announcement comes in the aftermath of the major data breach scandal the company is embroiled in.

The error occurred between May 18 and May 22 and was fixed by May 27, the BBC reported. “We would like to apologise for this mistake,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s head of privacy.

Facebook said it had made the announcement out of an “abundance of caution” adding that users have been asked to review their posts during the period. “Every time you share something on Facebook, we show you an audience selector so you can decide who gets to see the post,” the company said. “This bug occurred as we were building a new way to share featured items on your profile, like a photo. Since these featured items are public, the suggested audience for all new posts – not just these items – was set to public. The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they had been using before.”

Advertisement

Data breach case

On April 11, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had testified before a committee of the United States Senate in the case of British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvesting the private data of 87 million Facebook users.

Cambridge Analytica is accused of using the information of 87 million Facebook users to bolster United States President Donald Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election.

Data sharing partnerships

On Tuesday, the company said it has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing company that has close ties with China’s government.

The social media company said computer maker Lenovo Group, and smartphone makers Huawei, OPPO and TCL Corp were among about 60 companies that received access to some user data after they signed contracts to recreate Facebook-like experiences for their users