The chat service on Facebook was closed, Wednesday, for maintenance services, after a security bug was discovered that allowed access to the discussions of users. The security breach allowed access to personal information. This is the second time this year where security breaches like this appear on the Facebook system.
A while ago, after a system update, Facebook users email addresses were made public on the site.
Wednesday, Facebook representatives said that, for a brief period of time, the security breach allowed some of the messages posted and friend requests to be visible through the exploitation of the “preview my profile” option.
In the last few months, the company introduced a series of changes the encouraged users to make public to everyone their own photos or some information from their personal profile. Recently, Facebook, they made some other changes through which users were obligated to release some information about their hobbies and interests.
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, executive director of Facebook, announced their intention to share some of the user details with other web sites. A recent study showed that 24% of Facebook users are not even aware of the fact that there is an option to protect their personal information, while others decide not to use this option.
Although this last problem was solved very fast, this made users fear regarding their personal information. ” Facebook has become more scary than fun” said a user. Some have decided to close their accounts, explaining this by the fact that Facebook offers too many “surprises” and too much changes in a brief period of time, and of course because of the security issues.
“We’re not perfect!” Said Elliot Scharge, one of the Facebook vicepresidents. Facebook shows us how technology changes the concepts of privacy and control.
The tensions created around all these security breaches attract a lot of attention, especially since their appear in the context of some debates regarding the security of personal data of users registered on different sites on the Internet. Although minor, the Facebook security problems has appeared in a very wrong moment because it threatens to undermine everything that Facebook hoped to accompilish through the social network in the last years, and now users have to ask themselves if this platform is trustworthy. Despite all these problems, the number of users on Facebook continues to grow.
