Facebook offers curt apology over blocking tool bug
A coding glitch allowed some accounts that had been previously blocked to see public posts and contact blocked accounts. Is the social media platform doing enough to apologize?
In another blow to Facebook’s privacy and safety cred, the organization announced a bug had unblocked thousands of accounts.
Facebook broke the news in a blog post, which read in part:
Starting today we are notifying over 800,000 users about a bug in Facebook and Messenger that unblocked some people they had blocked. The bug was active between May 29 and June 5—and while someone who was unblocked could not see content shared with friends, they could have seen things posted to a wider audience. For example, pictures shared with friends of friends. We know that the ability to block someone is important—and we’d like to apologize and explain what happened.
When you block someone on Facebook they cannot see things you post on your profile, start conversations with you on Messenger or add you as a friend. Blocking also automatically unfriends them if you were previously friends. In the case of this bug:
The news was troubling to many, and news outlets framed the conversation around the privacy and data misuse scandal that Facebook has been fighting since early this year.
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