Latest Facebook privacy flaw reveals Zuckerberg private photos

Dec 7, 2011, 16:53 GMT

San Francisco - Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg always apologizes when his social networking site runs afoul of common privacy standards. But the latest flaw may have left him really sorry.

Users of the site revealed a glitch Tuesday that could allow anyone to see users' private photos, and by Wednesday morning Zuckerberg's private snapshots had been exposed to anyone with a web browser and had been viewed over 500,000 times.

The photos, which were posted on image-sharing site Imgur.com with the message 'It's time to fix those security flaws Facebook,' were not particularly revealing. Most of them showed the young multi-billionaire in his kitchen, playing with his dog or handing out chocolate to kids on Halloween.

But it provided a stark illustration of one of the most glaring privacy glitches in Facebook's history.

The flaw was revealed by users of a body-building forum on Facebook. It takes advantage of the tools that Facebook had for policing inappropriate pictures. By blocking a target's profile and reporting an inappropriate profile photo because of nudity or pornography, users are then asked by a Facebook prompt to select additional photos from the target's private photo stash to include in their report of inappropriate photos.

Facebook said that it had fixed the glitch.

'The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user's most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos,' Facebook said in a statement.

'Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.'