It’s time Facebook re-evaluated its tech teams and executives, as yet another blunder makes the headlines.
After the Cambridge Analytica fiasco that grabbed a lot of media attention globally, Facebook has also made the news for a bug that changed the privacy settings of some accounts. After these issues, you’d think they will be more careful.
On Friday, the company confirmed to CNET that roughly 3% of apps on Facebook Analytics had their weekly summary information leaked to outsiders. These reports contained three metrics about the apps—the number of new users, weekly active users and page views, and were mistakenly sent to people identified as testers.
“All detailed information is available via a link, which doesn’t work for tester who mistakenly received the email,” Facebook told CNET. “We’ve started notifying the apps involved today and have made technical changes to prevent this from happening again.”
“Due to an error in our email delivery system, weekly business performance summaries we send to developers about their account were also sent to a small group of those developer’s app testers. No personal information about people on Facebook was shared,” said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne. “We’re sorry for the error and have updated our system to prevent it from happening again.”
Facebook confirms that the report didn’t contain any sensitive details itself. Instead, it contained a link to the actual details that has been rendered inaccessible by the app testers. After the incident, Facebook began notifying the affected app owners about the matter, confirming that the sensitive details about the apps remain safe.
The email states: “We mistakenly sent the last weekly email summary to your Testers, in addition to the usual group of Admins, Analysts, and Developers who get updates. Testers were only able to see the high-level summary information in the email, and were not able to access any other account information; if they clicked “View Dashboard” they did not have access to any of your Facebook Analytics information.”
