Article appeared on telegraph.co.uk.
Facebook has taken its chat system offline while it repairs a security hole that allowed users to see other people’s private chats.
The security flaw, discovered by TechCrunch, relates to a feature on Facebook that allows users to preview their own privacy settings. Describing the problem, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear wrote: "There is a major security flaw in the social networking site that, with just a few mouse clicks, enables any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends’ latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common. That’s a lot of potentially sensitive information."
He said that TechCrunch had informed Facebook of the problem. Facebook now displays a message that says “chat is down for maintenance at this time”.
In a statement, Facebook said: “For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”
Recent changes to the way Facebook shares its users information with other users and third parties have drawn criticism from privacy watchdogs and from US Senators.
Last week, Michael Bennet, the senator for Colorado, Mark Begich, who represents Alaska, Al Franken, the senator for Minnesota, and Charles Schumer, the senator for New York, called on the US Federal Trade Commission to lay down strict guidelines that would safeguard privacy on social networking sites.
They said they had written to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, to express their concerns. However, Facebook insisted that privacy was its “highest priority”.
Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications at Facebook, said: “These new products and features are designed to enhance personalisation and promote social activity across the internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom. All of Facebook's partner sites interact with a user's consent."
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