About 14 million Facebook users around the world had their default sharing setting for all new posts set to public, the company revealed Thursday.
The bug, which affected those users from May 18 to May 22, occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature.
After Facebook employees discovered the bug, the company went back and changed the privacy settings for all posts shared by those 14 million users during that time.
Facebook posts typically default to the last “audience” a post was shared with, such as family members, friends, or friends except their boss. That default was changed to public for the 14 million users, but if affected users noticed, they could have manually switched the setting themselves.
Facebook changed every post by those users during the affected time period to private, including posts that people may have meant to share publicly.
Affected Facebook users will get a notification on the app or website starting Thursday. They’ll see a message from Facebook urging users to “Please Review Your Posts” and a link to a list of what they shared on Facebook while the bug was active.
Facebook said Thursday that it would notify 14 million users that posts they intended to share privately may have been published publicly, the company’s latest setback as it tries to rebuild user trust after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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