Facebook has reportedly fixed a critical security flaw that briefly allowed users to view the live chats of their friends and see pending friend requests.
“The bug was buried in a feature that allows users to see whether certain parts of their profile are hidden or accessible to a particular user,” explained Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal.
“Facebook designed the feature to help enhance privacy by allowing users to see how their profile appears to another user. But some users began reporting Wednesday that while accessing the feature, they were able to see live chats of the person they were viewing their profile as.”
Facebook confirmed the above-mentioned glitch – along with a subsequent fix – in an official statement quoted by the BBC.
“For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the ‘preview my profile’ feature of Facebook privacy settings.
“When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete.”
