Facebook photo privacy loophole disabled while glitch is fixed

By: Chenda Ngak
Topics: Tech Talk ,; Wired for Women

(Credit: Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg)

(CBS) - Let's hope your stalkers aren't as tech savvy as you are. For a short period of time, a loophole in Facebook's security let anyone access its members' private photos.

Full coverage of Facebook on Tech Talk

A member the bodybuilding.com forum discovered a security flaw in Facebook that would allow anyone to access a user's private photos. That discussion thread has since been deleted.

The method was a roundabout way that would only come in handy if you wanted to block a user or report obscene photos.

Once a person is reported, an option popped up to help Facebook filter out the obscene content. If you checked off the "inappropriate profile photos" option, another box would give the option to report "nudity or pornography." If this option was selected, Facebook displayed all of the user's private photos.

Facebook's chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, became a victim of his own company's security flaw. Oh, the irony. The young CEO's private photos were uploaded to the image sharing site Imgur.

Facebook issued a statement acknowledging the loophole and announced the function would be disabled until they can release a fix.

"Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously," the company said in a statement.

"The bug was a result of one of our most recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one's photos. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed."

Facebook is the world's largest social network, with over 800 million active users and an average of 250 million photos uploaded per day.