July 23, 2010 by Trent Morgan
Social media giants Facebook have been subjected to a flurry of concerns, after users realised that there was a security glitch in the system which put privacy at risk. The flaw enabled people to listen in on live chats being carried out by people on their friends list, and also see who had pending friend requests on their profiles.
A Facebook spokesperson commented: “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. 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. The chat function will be turned back on shortly.”
The security breach actually originated from an attempt to protect the online safety of users, but the software privacy settings were found to give people access to private data with just a few clicks. Personal information about users was widely available if people undertook a mild hacking experiment, and the ability to spy on friend’s personal chat messages provide irresistible to some users.
Candid West, security expert at Symantec, issued a statement relating to Facebook’s prompt actions in relation to the breach: “For any organisation, whether you are a social networking site or not, privacy breaches are worrying. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first privacy breach of its kind to plague a social networking site – other high-profile sites have also been affected with similar problems. Facebook has acted quickly in fixing the alleged flaw, whereas some social networking sites have been known to take days to fix issues reported.”
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