Facebook Inc. said it unknowingly gave outside developers access to private user information shared within some groups on its main social network, including the names and profile photos of people who were part of those groups.<\/p>\n
The company\u00a0disclosed\u00a0the issue Tuesday, saying that for the past 18 months some third-party developers who used Facebook\u2019s Groups API — a software program that allows for information sharing between Facebook and outside developers — could see which users shared posts or left comments inside a group, even though they weren\u2019t supposed to have that level of detail. Access to that information has now been removed or limited, the company said.<\/p>\n
Beginning in April 2018, Facebook restricted access so that these outside partners could only see the text of posts or comments from inside groups, but not the names or photos of the people who shared them. The company discovered in a recent review that this additional information was also being shared. This API is popular with developers who build programs to manage Facebook\u00a0groups\u00a0focused on topics like customer service.<\/p>\n
The Menlo Park, California-based company said it is reaching out to 100 third-party developers who had access to the data that was supposed to have been restricted. Facebook said in a blog post that it has seen no evidence of abuse, but \u201cwe will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained.\u201d A company spokesman declined to say how many users were affected.<\/p>\n
These types of APIs were also at the center of Facebook\u2019s data scandal in early 2018, in which an outside researcher collected personal information from Facebook users and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company. Facebook has since promised to crack down on its data sharing, and announced in September that it had\u00a0suspended\u00a0\u201ctens of thousands\u201d of outside developers that had access to some Facebook data.<\/p>\n
Facebook said it unknowingly gave outside developers access to private user information shared within some groups on its main social network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":221971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[55800,161],"class_list":["post-326461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-data-security","tag-facebook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}