Over the weekend Facebook alerted its users that a security flaw may have accidentally exposed the email and phone number for many users. Don’t worry though, it was only 6 million users.
Facebook advised that the bug was part of the “Download Your Information” feature where users can download the archive of their Facebook account.
The company wrote on Friday explaining the issue “Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook… As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection.”
When Facebook was alerted of the error they quickly disabled the tool, corrected the issue and had it back up and running the next day.
Facebook further explained the bug “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook — not developers or advertisers — have access to the DYI tool.”
After seeing what some people can do with computers I live by one simple tech rule. If you don’t want everybody to see it/know it, don’t put it on a computer.