14 DAY TRIAL // All the world had access to the private pictures of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, after a post on a bodybuilding forum revealed to the social network’s customers how they can see the private photographs of a member without being in their contact list.
The Facebook feature that allowed users to report an inappropriate photo and block an abusive user could be taken advantage of to view the pictures of the member who was being reported. At one point in the process, the user that reported the abuse was requested to choose more abusive pictures posted on the profile of the one he was turning in.
The post didn’t mention anything about Zuckerberg’s pictures, but the ones that read it immediately got creative and not long after, the internet was filled with the CEO’s private moments.
Zuckerberg before and after killing a chicken, Zuckerberg and his girlfriend playing with their puppy, and even pictures of him with president Obama were quickly leaked for all to see.
As soon as they found out about the issue, Facebook quickly moved and deactivated the system to make sure no other abuses take place.
"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," Facebook said in a statement to PCmag.
"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."
The entire incident comes after Facebook was accused by the FTC for not being transparent enough when it comes to their privacy policies. The FTC was unhappy with the fact that the social media website allowed for private information to be made public, even though they were constantly promising customers that their data was safe.