Facebook has fixed a serious hole in its service that allowed users to peek into live chats of their Facebook Contacts. Once again, Facebook's Privacy settings had a serious exploit, which was pointed out by Steve O'Hear, author with TechCrunch. Infact, O'Hear was tipped by Scott and Matt Atwood. Thankfully, Facebook has fixed this bug and now peace has been restored.
Facebook's Privacy settings have been causing havoc lately and select users have been taking their privacy seriously. Mark Zuckerber, CEO of Facebook, reportedly said that he doesn't care about privacy. In a video, O'Hear showed how he could exploit the Facebook bug and peek into live chat of users and also check their pending invites.
Later, Facebook fixed the bug and sent out a statement:
"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. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented."
Though Facebook has done a good job by patching the security hole in its privacy settings, it's advisable for them to get their website code reviewed. As for you users, you never know what holes lie in such social networks, so once again we request you to resist divulging personal contact details publicly.
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