You might scroll through Facebook in peace because you think that all your creepy stalkers are far away from you – resting in your block list. Well, there’s a bad news for you as a new Facebook bug may have put your Facebook account in jeopardy. On July 2nd, Facebook revealed that a bug had disrupted the normal privacy settings of 800,000 users. The bug allowed users who’d been blocked on Facebook and Messenger to become unblocked. Not only this, the users who had blocked the people, had no clue about the same.
This was a huge disappointment, and coming from Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), the social network used by over 2.2 billion people on monthly basis around the globe, it was truly unexpected. All those people who had blocked their exes, or those teenagers blocking their entire family on Facebook, were both horrified and displeased with the news.
You need not freak out already, as a little relief was provided by Mark Zuckerberg, quoting that 83% of people affected by the Facebook bug had “only” one blocked person temporarily unblocked. The other 17% of users had more than one person unblocked, thanks to the Facebook bug.
However, you need not log into your accounts just for the sake of seeing whether you were among the 800,000 affected users or not, because as of now, the Facebook bug has been rectified by the Facebook Team. Nonetheless, if you were among the affected users, you would see a Facebook notification encouraging you to check your blocked lists.
The new Facebook bug was just an addition to the errors made by the social media company, which has increased fairly in the last few months. However, the company stepped forward and publicly apologized for committing such a huge mistake.
“We know that the ability to block someone is important — and we’d like to apologize and explain what happened,” Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a blog post.
Facebook Block Feature: Get Rid of Nuisance
For the part of our audience who is aloof, blocking someone on Facebook directly means that the blocked person loses all access to the one who has blocked him/her. She/he cannot watch their pictures, read their posts or catch up with any activity of the other person. Not only this, the blocked person can also not initiate any conversations on messenger with the blocking person. Due to these severe restrictions, a person felt relaxed after blocking anyone who had been harassing or disturbing them through Facebook. However, this relaxation was snatched away due to the Facebook bug, which was active between May 29 and June 5. This bug allowed the blocked users to view posts shared with wider audiences, for example, friends of friends, and also gave them the permission to message the user who had blocked them
As of now, there is no specific information regarding the target audience of the Facebook bug. However, few publications have claimed that the bug was random and global, affecting users from all over.
As we have already mentioned above, the blocking feature is essentially important in contributing towards making Facebook a safe and secure place for its users and this Facebook bug has not only degraded Facebook’s reputation but also instilled a fear in the minds of the user that it might happen again.
Standing up and apologizing for the mistake is a good step, but keeping in mind all the recent blunders occurring at the social media company, it still has to have a long path to protect its users’ privacy. Till then, we can only scroll our Facebook feed with our fingers crossed, hoping this won’t happen again!
