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Facebook addresses security flaw

Publish date: 21 June 2017
Issue Number: 1688
Diary: Legalbrief eLaw
Category: Internet

Facebook last year introduced a bug in its content moderation software that exposed the identities of workers who police content on the social network to those being policed, raising the possibility of retribution. ‘We learned that the names of certain people who work for Facebook to enforce our policies could have been viewed by a specific set of Group admins within their admin activity log,’ a Facebook spokesperson told The Register. ‘As soon as we learned about this issue, we fixed it and began a thorough investigation to learn as much as possible about what happened.’ The report notes that the security flaw, essentially a permission issue, was introduced in mid-October, identified in early November and fixed two weeks later. It affected roughly 1 000 Facebook workers – a mix of employees and contractors – across almost two dozen departments who use the company's content moderation software. Among these were around 40 who worked in the counter-terrorism division at Facebook's Dublin, Ireland office.

Full report in The Register

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