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New Facebook iPhone App Has Privacy Problem

by Terrence O'Brien on September 10, 2009 at 07:30 AM

New Facebook iPhone App Has Privacy Problem
Facebook is no stranger to privacy problems. The company has come under fire for its use of ads, and has fallen victim to gaping security holes that reveal personal information users have elected to keep private.

The latest embarrassment stems from the new version of the Facebook iPhone app, in which a bug is allowing users to access features that a Page's administrator had disabled. For example, Barack Obama's Page understandably forbids Wall comments in order to keep people from posting offensive content or malicious links. It turns out that if you load the Page with the iPhone app, however, you can post anything you want.

According to TechCrunch, this isn't the first time the new Facebook has failed to protect its customers' privacy. Originally, the app was ignoring privacy settings on status updates, exposing them to friends who were supposed to be blocked.

We're sure Facebook will address the issue swiftly. Still, the fact that simple yet glaring bugs like these continue to make it through the company's quality controls leads us to believe that there is a systematic problem here. Facebook should hurry to institute tougher testing and tighter controls before they become the Microsoft of the social networking world. [From: TechCrunch]

Tags: app store, AppStore, facebook, facebook pages, FacebookPages, iphone, privacy, social networking, SocialNetworking

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