Facebook Privacy Breach

The leading social network, Facebook has faced yet more criticism over its security due to a recent privacy lapse.

A bug in the site allowed Facebook users to view their friends' chat sessions and any pending friend requests on the site, prompting the social networking company, which has more that 400million users worldwide, to suspend it's instant messaging feature while engineers worked to fix the error.

By manipulating the “preview my profile” feature, users were able to view their friends' private chat messages and pending friend requests.

“We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in the US, said “Our view is that the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] needs to act on consumer concerns about Facebook's sloppy privacy and security practices.”

Candid Wueest, from the internet security firm Symantec, said: “For any organisation, whether you are a social networking site or not, privacy breaches are worrying.”

15 organisations in the United States have now joined together to file an official complaint against the site with the Federal Trade Commission, as well as issuing a letter to US Congress asking legislators to monitor the FTC's progress.

Search Engine Optimisation/SEO UK News & Website Design News By Thomas Cole Internet Solutions

Posted Tuesday May 11^th 2010
By Thomas Cole Ltd