META Meta Platforms Inc

By Aisha Al-Muslim 

Facebook Inc. said unshared pictures of up to 6.8 million users may have been exposed by a software issue that granted app developers access to the photos.

Up to 1,500 apps may have had improper access to photos, including draft posts, from Sept. 13 to Sept. 25, Facebook said Friday in a post on its developers' blog.

The company said it has since fixed the issue after an internal team made the discovery.

"We're sorry this happened," wrote Tomer Bar, engineering director at Facebook, in the blog post.

Early next week, Facebook will roll out tools for third-party app developers to determine which people might have been affected by the application program interface bug. Facebook said it will work with the developers to delete affected users' photos.

The social-network company, which will notify people potentially impacted through an alert on Facebook, also recommended users log into any apps with Facebook authorization to check or update photo-sharing permissions.

"When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline," Mr. Bar wrote. "In this case, the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories. The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post."

The company's disclosure Friday comes as it faces a range of regulatory inquiries into how it safeguards user privacy, treats its competitors and controls access to its platform.

Many of those inquiries stemmed from the disclosure earlier this year that an app developer improperly shared the data from as many as 87 million Facebook users with data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Last week, the U.K. Parliament released a trove of internal Facebook emails that show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and other executives pursued hard-nosed tactics to stifle competitors, as well as considering a range of possibilities for monetizing the massive amounts of data the company collected on its users.

The Wall Street Journal reported the documents show Facebook gave some third-party developers special access to user data and several years ago contemplated charging developers for data access, a step that would have marked a shift away from the social-media giant's policy of not selling that information.

In response, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post: "Like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas. Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continued to provide the developer platform for free and developers could choose to buy ads if they wanted. This model has worked well."

Write to Aisha Al-Muslim at aisha.al-muslim@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 14, 2018 12:28 ET (17:28 GMT)

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