Your ‘Private’ Facebook Posts May Have Been Made Public (Video)

Facebook announced that in May, 14 million Facebook users had their default sharing setting for all new posts set to public. Veuer’s Sam Berman has the full story.

It. Just. Doesn’t. Stop.

Facebook is embroiled in a snafu that exposed users’ private postings and made them public, the company admitted Thursday.

For four days, between May 18 to 22, Facebook tested a new feature that inadvertently switched the default settings for 14 million users from private to public allowing anyone on the Internet view status updates that were intended only for private audiences.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts,” Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan, said in a statement.

Normally, a new post will default to whichever setting was selected for the previous one, but in this case all new messages automatically went to public.

Probably not so mortifying for the extroverts out there, but it is terrible news for anyone who is try to block ex-boyfriends or frenemies from seeing their latest updates — or more seriously, share valuable private information intended for a specific recipient.