Zuckerberg may have killed this himself; in another photo, in which he appears in the same shirt, Zuckerberg is holding a plate of chicken wings.
Facebook has a problem with privacy – and it’s not all teenagers oversharing. This week, an anonymous hacker type exploited a “glitch” that allows users to view recently uploaded photos, regardless of their privacy settings, and posted 14 images of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from his personal page on the Internets. The first place the photos showed up, interestingly, was a body builder forum (the thread has since been removed).
This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has been the victim of his own site’s “bugs”: Two years ago, his private photos were revealed to the world when the site switched to more “open” privacy settings. And this certainly isn’t the first time Facebook has come under fire for privacy issues – just last week, the social network was forced to admit that it had made a “bunch of mistakes” when it came to privacy laws after getting its hand slapped by the US Federal Trade Commission. Unsurprisingly, some on the Internets are experiencing some very gleeful schadenfreude: “It’s about time Zuckerberg was affected by his company’s sloppy handling of user data,” wrote Gawker’s Ryan Tate. “He should be personally impacted every time Facebook fumbles on privacy. By law!”
Facebook has since remedied the problem, which the social network giant blamed on their most recent “code push” and said was live for only a short time.
So, what have we learned this time around?
1. ‘Code pushes’ make problems. Facebook says that it has since fixed the problem, but what was the bug in the first place? ZDNet explained, “Users are able to report ‘inappropriate profile photos’ on a user’s profile. By checking the box ‘nudity or pornography’, the user is granted an opportunity to help Facebook ‘take action by selecting additional photos to include with your report.’ Facebook will then display a number of additional photos that are not otherwise publicly available to the user.”
2. Zuckerberg slaughters his own chickens. Or at least he may have done. One of the leaked images is of the Facebook founder holding a chicken by its feet; another shows a plate of what appeared to be fried chicken wings. Coincidence? We think not. Zuckerberg is, evidently, on a personal quest to appreciate his food, and, after whetting his bloodlust on an innocent lobster, he’s moved on to slaughtering chickens, goats, even the odd bison. “Lock your doors, is all we’re saying. And politely decline any suspicious invitations to take a stroll through the woods,” warned Ryan Tate at Gawker.
3. He makes his own sushi, gives out Halloween candy, and has met President Barack Obama. The 14 leaked photos, available at an image sharing site under the heading “It’s time to fix those security flaws, Facebook”, are pretty pedestrian stuff – here’s Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, making sushi, here they are passing out Halloween candy to a pack of adorable children. The photo of Zuckerberg meeting the President, that’s the kind of thing that’s available on the White House website. The point of leaking the photos, of course, isn’t about what they contain, but rather that they could be released to the wider public without his permission.
4. His dog really is adorable. Back in March, Zuckerberg got a dog, a small, white puffball of a dog called Beast. Beast features prominently in several of the leaked photos, although it’s nothing that you wouldn’t see on Beast’s Facebook page. Pursuant to point number two, Zuckerberg does not appear to be raising Beast to eventually eat him.
5. Facebook is or is not paying attention to privacy issues. The monolithic social media giant has, of course, come under fire for letting this bug slip through its security parameters. “If that doesn’t prove that [Facebook's] developers aren’t thinking about security, I don’t know what would,” said one developer on HackerNews. “Nobody who is in a culture of protecting security would even consider building this.” But Facebook took pains to make sure its users knew that it takes these “bugs” seriously (it does have a reporting mechanism by which security researchers can alert them to bugs); a spokesman told media outlets that the system that enabled the glitch was disabled immediately, adding, “The privacy of our user’s data is a top priority for us, and we invest lots of resources in protecting our site and the people who use it.”
