About 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting a message just to friends or smaller groups may have actually been sharing it widely with the general public due to a software bug, the company said Thursday.

The bug, which was active from May 18 to May 27, changed users’ privacy settings without them knowing. The company said the problem has been fixed. Facebook will notify the 14 million users who could have been affected starting Thursday, with a notification at the top of their news feeds.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement.

It’s another misstep in Facebook’s ongoing data privacy issues, spurred by revelations of a data leak that affecting as many as 87 million users.

The issue resulted from Facebook’s efforts to allow users to highlight items on their profiles, like photos. The featured items defaulted to public settings, which inadvertently made all posts by the user during the affected time period also default to public.

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake,” Egan said.

Source: Tech CNBC
A Facebook bug made private posts of 14 million users public