New Facebook security flaw, exposes private conversations on the walls of 14 million users

Error in a Facebook update, causes private conversations of users to be published on their walls of the social network, affecting some fourteen million users.

I don't know how many times we have said that this year is being especially problematic for computer security and user privacy. This year should mark a before and after in the field of security and privacy, but it seems quite complicated for something like this to happen. Facebook is in all the trouble, especially after Cambridge Analytica and the last great scandal has been the leak of private messages from some fourteen million users of the social network, due to an alleged error.

Security and privacy are a problem for Facebook.

We are talking about 14 million users, that if we take into account that there are more than 2.000 million users in the social network, we are talking about a small leak, but in terms of security and privacy, there are no leaks or small errors in their protection, they are all gigantic, affecting one, two or fourteen million people.

This error, which showed private messages, had its origin in a technical problem, while the implementation of a new system to highlight publications is being tested, which changes a lot from its current mechanics. When something is published on the Timeline, Facebook uses a privacy setting by default, which has been modified and which generated an error that caused the affected users to have the public mode activated. The problem occurred between May 18 and 22. Once detected, the error was solved.

Although the social network is clearly guilty of not taking care of user data and allowing anyone to obtain it, it is also true that Facebook does not force anyone to reveal intimate or private aspects and if they are shared and later, if the information it is sold to third parties, it is because nothing is free in this life. If we do not want something to be in the public domain, it is as simple as not publishing it.

We have become accustomed to not paying for different services and we want everything for free, but companies like Facebook, Google or Twitter are not charity sisters, they are companies created to make money. The user is solely responsible for their privacy and for knowing what they should share or not on social networks, instead of blaming third parties for selling what we publish on these social networks. Would you like to pay to use Facebook or Twitter and that what you publish could not end up in the hands of third parties?