Facebook's privacy problems: a roundup

Facebook disclosed on Friday that a bug may have affected up to 6.8 million users, allowing app developers to see photos that users had uploaded but never posted – but this was hardly the first mea culpa the social media giant has had to send out regarding data and security as of late.

Here’s a quick look at Facebook’s recent issues with user privacy:

A whistleblower came forward in March to reveal that Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the personal Facebook data of 50 million people in order to profile and target users for political advertisements. After five days of silence, Mark Zuckerberg apologised for his company’s “mistakes”.

A bug in June caused a glitch that publicly published the posts of 14 million users that were intended to be private. Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, apologised for the “mistake” and said the company had since fixed the glitch.

Hackers were able to access and steal personal information in nearly half of the 30m accounts affected in a September security breach. The company initially believed that 50 million users were affected in an attack that gave the hackers control of accounts.