Facebook Chat disabled due to Chat Bug – privacy of 400 million at stake ?

Yesterday when i logged into my facebook account, things were a little different. I was literally spammed with “Facebook chat disabled – do you have any idea”  Facebook Chat disabled due to Chat Bug – privacy of 400 million at stake ? - theprohack.commessages in my inbox. “No folks, i dont have any, but soon I will”,I replied as I found out that the Facebook chat function was disabled and there was a cryptic message of maintainance posted in place of it. A bit of googling enlightened me about the situation, as facebook engineers disabled the live chat function after folks at TechCrunch discovered a major bug that made private conversations visible to other users.

An emergency action was taken to correct a different security that allowed users to see their friends' pending friend requests. Ironically its quite contradictory to the Zuckerberg’s views according to whom

"people have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and more openly and with more people."

The holes were a result of a "preview my profile" feature which was added last month to give users more control over their privacy settings. Facebook has been under fire from critics who say that the site is playing with the privacy of 400 million users. Even former Facebook privacy honcho distanced himself from the most recent policy shift, which automatically shares user data with partners.

"I strongly encourage Facebook to structure all its programs to allow Facebook users to give permission before their information is shared with third parties," he wrote.

Facebook Chat disabled due to Chat Bug – privacy of 400 million at stake ? - - theprohack.com

In the mean time, Facebook commented at its fan page -

"Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us," it said. "It should return to normal soon … We apologise for the inconvenience."

5000+ likes and 14 hours later, chat is restored..I wonder how many bugs are there waiting to be exploited..

 

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