Facebook said a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. The bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.
FILE- In this March 29, 2018, file photo the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square. Facebook says a software bug made some private posts public for as many as 14 million users for several days in May. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
The problem, which Facebook said it has fixed, is the latest privacy scandal for the world's largest social media company.
It said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to "friends only" or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.
Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.
The news follows recent furor over Facebook's sharing of user data with device makers, including China's Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.
Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, said on Twitter that this latest privacy gaffe "looks like a viable Federal Trade Commission/state attorney general deception case." That's because the company had promised that the setting users set in their most recent privacy preferences would be maintained for future posts. In this case, this did not happen for several days.
Facebook's 2011 consent decree with the FTC calls for the company to get "express consent" from users before sharing their information beyond what they established in their privacy settings. Even if the bug was an accident on Facebook's part, Mayer said in an email that the FTC can bring enforcement action for privacy mistakes.
Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users, says the bug was active from May 18 until May 27. While the company says it stopped the error on May 22, it was not able to change all the posts back to their original privacy parameters until later.
The mistake happened when the company built a new way for people to share "featured items" on their profiles. These items, which include posts and photo albums, are automatically public. In the process of creating this feature, Facebook said it accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts public.
When people post to Facebook, the service suggests a default distribution for their posts based on past privacy settings. If someone made all posts "friends only" in the past, it will set their next post to "friends only" as well. People can still manually change the privacy level of the posts — anywhere from "public" to "only me" — and this was the case while the bug was active as well.
Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta said Wednesday its first-quarter profit more than doubled, boosted by higher advertising revenue and a 6% increase on the average price of ads on its platforms. But its shares dropped sharply in after-hours trading following lukewarm revenue guidance.
Meta Platforms Inc. earned $12.37 billion, or $4.71 per share, in the January-March period. That's up from $5.71 billion, or $2.20 per share, in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue rose 27% to $36.46 billion from $28.65 billion.
Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $4.32 per share on revenue of $36.14 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.
For the current quarter, the Menlo Park, California-based company said it expects revenue between $36.5 billion and $39 billion. Analysts are expecting revenue of $38.25 billion for the second quarter, which is higher than the midpoint of Meta's guidance range.
Meta also said it expects its 2024 capital expenses to be higher than anticipated due to its investments in artificial intelligence. It is forecasting expenses in the range of $35 billion to $40 billion, up from its earlier guidance of $30 billion to $37 billion.
The company has been investing heavily in AI and earlier this month unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence systems that are powering what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”
Meta, along with leading AI developers Google and OpenAI, and startups such as Anthropic, Cohere and France’s Mistral, have been churning out new AI language models and hoping to persuade customers they’ve got the smartest, handiest or most efficient chatbots.
“Meta’s earnings should serve as a stark warning for companies reporting this earnings season," said Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com “Even though the company did beat estimates in all top- and bottom-line metrics, it didn’t matter as much as the reported lowering revenue expectations for Q2. This is the exact opposite of what Tesla did yesterday and goes to show that investors are currently looking at the near future with heavy mistrust.”
On Tuesday, electric vehicle maker Tesla reported that its first-quarter net income plummeted 55%. But it said it would accelerate production of new, more affordable vehicles, and on Wednesday its stock rose 12%.
The number of people using Meta's apps, meanwhile, continued to increase, with 3.24 billion users on average for March in its “family of apps” that includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. That's up 7% year-over-year. Beginning this quarter, the company will no longer disclose user figures for Facebook.
Meta had 69,329 workers as of March 31, a decrease of 10% year-over-year. Zuckerberg called 2023 the “year of efficiency" and the company laid off thousands to reduce expenses.
Meta's shares fell 16% in after-hours trading. Meta's stock price has more than doubled over the past year thanks to a rebound in online advertising.
FILE - A Meta Portal Go is displayed during a preview of the Meta Store in Burlingame, Calif., on May 4, 2022. Meta reports earnings on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
