Recent Facebook Glitch Reveals Private Info

NYTimes reports on a rather nasty Facebook glitch that reveals personal info:

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.


I wonder what kinds of processes and procedures Facebook will put into place to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future. Facebook is already facing a lot of heat from consumer groups regarding privacy. The worst case scenario for them is to have legislation passed dictating what they can and cannot do.

Not knowing anything about their system architecture and procedures, I'd suggest adding a significant number of regression tests for privacy, checking hundreds of scenarios to make sure that information that isn't supposed to be disclosed won't be disclosed.

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