Facebook and its privacy management are back in the limelight. The last we know is that a failure allowed users to have access to the chats of their contacts , among other data, for several hours . Steve O'Hear of the TechCrunch site received a notice warning him of a fairly simple " trick ". He put it into practice and found that it did indeed work .
First you enter the Privacy Settings of yourself. Then, click on Profile Information and View My Profile . Then, in the Search field at the top, you enter the name of someone who is included in our contact list . Voilá, your chat windows and requests from other friends are exposed in real time. It 's all in the following video :
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny8ui4delEo&feature=player_embedded
From TechCrunch they communicated the gap in security to Facebook . Hours later, the portal sent them a message in which it recognized that a "bug", or software error , had made such a discovery possible in privacy. According to those responsible for the social network , its engineers diagnosed the origin of the problem " quickly " and disabled the chat temporarily. In addition, they put a " patch " to prevent pending requests from friends from being displayed . At the present moment , everything is donerepaired . However, they do not know how long it has been since the fault occurred until it was discovered and fixed .
As we say, the controversy of Facebook and the personal data of its subscribers has long been going on, for one reason or another. Not long ago, after a change in security policy , the personal albums of a very high number of users were left unprotected . Facebook founder Marck Zuckerberg himself was the victim of the mess, incredible as it may seem . In addition, there is the question of the philosophy of the network, which announced in March its willingness to transfer user information to other associated websites . Just yesterday we published that MoveOn.org has created the platform "Facebook, respect my privacy!" .
This time it was a programming error . However, data protection is still a matter of concern . After all, in unscrupulous hands , they can become a very harmful weapon for Internet users .