Facebook is caught up in another data leak. It seems as if this year has been the worst in the history of Facebook and the issues don’t seem to stop. This time around, Facebook has found another major data leak affecting millions of their users. As part of the data leak, more than 6 million users’ Facebook photos have been compromised.

However, we cannot call this as a privacy leak because these photos were not exactly stolen or hacked from someone’s account. Rather, this data leak occurred due to a bug in Facebook’s system itself.

More specifically, Facebook found a bug in one of their APIs. This API is called as the Photo API by Facebook which company shares with other third-party developers. Now, each and every third-party developer has to get approved to gain access to this APIs. Therefore, it is not as if some sort of hackers got access to this APIs.

As part of this API bug, third-party app developers got access to Facebook users’ photos. Now, it is normal for apps who use Facebook API to get access to these photos.

But the bug let apps get access to photos outside of a user’s timeline too which is not possible normally. Therefore, if you posted a photo on any Facebook group or page than the app which has access to your account got access to those photos as well. Now, this is a significant leak on Facebook’s part and the company has apologized for it as well.

Apart from that, Facebook has mentioned that 6.8 million users’ photos were given access due to the bug. But it is worth noting that these users already gave the permission to those apps to gain limited access.

Facebook has also announced that they are working with app developers so that those photos get deleted.

Via – Wired