Facebook fixes "wrong friends list" mobile network security glitch
Friday, January 22, 2010
CNET reports that social media network Facebook has repaired a problem in the mobile version of its service that caused some mobile users to have full access to the friends lists of unassociated users.
The South Florida Times writes that the problems were the results of routing problems in at cellular service providers that cause the wireless services to misidentify users, granting them access to data that they should not have been able to view.
However, the social media network told CNET that it had fixed the error on its end, which involved a problem with the website's privacy settings. "There was an inconsistency between the Web and mobile versions of the site for the friend list visibility option," said Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman, in an email to the tech news site.
The Times, though, says that the privacy problems might not have been confined to Facebook. The issues with wireless data routing errors led to numerous errors for web apps and could have deposited misidentified cookies on smartphones, giving the wrong users access to the wrong accounts on a number of different services.
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