It has just been revealed that during a 12-day period in September, a bug enabled third-party app developers to access the photos of roughly 6.8 million Facebook users. More specifically, photos that people did not yet share with the rest of the world.
When you take a picture with the intention of uploading it to Facebook, if you get to the uploading process but do not complete said process, Facebook saves a copy of said photo just in case you come back to finish the job. Now all those questionable selfies you chose not to upload may be out there on the internet somewhere.
Some details of the photo API bug were gone over in a blog post by Tomer Bar, who is an engineering director at FaceBook. According to Bar, around 1,500 apps built by 876 developers may have had access to your private photos during the 12-day period.
Bar offered up an apology for the mishap, but given Facebook’s continued trend of mishaps, this apology didn’t do much, especially considering the fact that it comes more than two months late.
