Facebook encounters privacy bug and disables chat

A bug in Facebook this week caused a security concern for its users as some of their pending friend requests and live chat messages where viewable their by their contacts/friends.

In Facebook’s privacy settings there is a feature where you can “Preview My Profile” as if your friend/ contact was looking at it. However in this case the bug actually gave an inside look of the other user’s profile – displaying live chat conversations and friend requests of the user whose “view” was being previewed.

“For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the ‘preview my profile’ feature of Facebook privacy settings,” a statement from Facebook read.

“When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete.”

“We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”

There has been talk ‘off record’ by Facebook employees, that Mark Zuckerberg – CEO and Founder of Facebook does not ‘believe in privacy’.

This situation has now been resolved by Facebook.