After the issue with pornographic spam, Facebook has to tackle a new problem. Sources have said that Facebook’s system for reporting photo’s can be exploited to view images that have been set to private by the user. Even the CEO and founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg became a victim of this when some of his personal photos were snatched and was later uploaded on the web.
According to the source, it can enable anyone who has a Facebook account to gain access to member’s photos that includes those who are set in private by choosing to report or block the member for having an improper profile picture. Facebook will then display the photos of the member that can’t be ordinarily viewed publicly. If the one you’re reporting is your friend then you can even enlarge the photo.
The report abuse feature is a mechanism that enables Facebook users to police their own ranks. It empowers users to block messages from an individual and flag inappropriate photographs.
Facebook has released a statement regarding this problem and it reads:
“Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of appropriate content simultaneously. 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. This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm that the bug has been fixed”.
