A Facebook Bug Exposed Anonymous Admins of Pages

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook Pages give public figures, businesses, and other entities a presence on Facebook that isn't tied to an individual profile. The accounts behind those pages are anonymous unless a Page owner opts to make the admins public. You can't see, for example, the names of the people who post to Facebook on WIRED's behalf. But a bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one. All software has flaws, and Facebook quickly pushed a fix for this one -- but not before word got around on message boards like 4chan, where people posted screenshots that doxed the accounts behind prominent pages. All it took to exploit the bug was opening a target page and checking the edit history of a post. Facebook mistakenly displayed the account or accounts that made edits to each post, rather than just the edits themselves.

Facebook says the bug was the result of a code update that it pushed Thursday evening. Facebook points out that no information beyond a name and public profile link were available, but that information isn't supposed to appear in the edit history at all. And for people, say, running anti-regime Pages under a repressive government, making even that much information public is plenty alarming.

"Move fast and break things"

[Anachronous Coward]

Check.

Anonymous cowardice ...

[BAReFO0t]

... breeds assholery.

Non-anonymous-cowardice in large groups, breeds assholery too, but with bigger offline implications.

Anonymous cowardice in small groups, breeds filter bubble groupthink circle-jerks.

Non-anonymous-cowardice in small groups (< Dunbar's number), breeds friendship. So we can be assholes *together*! :)

Should be SOP

[Ol Olsoc]

Why this isn't standard is beyond me. Especially since Facebook promotes publication of lies

F*c*book f*c*ed up? Is anybody really surprised?

[DarkVader]

It's not like F*c*book is an organization known for integrity and attention to detail when it comes to security.

If you're on F*c*book, you get what you deserve.

Re: F*c*book f*c*ed up? Is anybody really surpris

[fbobraga]

Yeap: Facebook is poison, that already affected Instagram and WhatsApp

That's preposterous

[jagerhans]

How people still trust facebook , it beats me. It is pretty obvious by now that FB is a snitch and it is administered in a way that totally, grossly disrespects everyone, they even ran experiments on their subscribers to fathom how much they could be manipulated. Anyone who wants at least to *try* maintaining some kind of privacy (let's not even start talking about "anonimity" and other semi legendary creatures) should steer clear of FB and its Gestapo-like ways. I've seen grown men become obsessive compul

Re: That's preposterous

[fbobraga]

...how people still uses Ingram and WhatsApp (both Facebook property now) amazes me as well

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Because they are stupid. Period, full stop, no argument against is valid. A lot of people paying Faceboot for advertising actually believe their ads are being targeted by interest or geographical location when neither thing is true. I went in and deleted the literally thousands of interests Faceboot assigned to me without asking and it just assigned a bunch more, including many of the same ones I deliberately removed. It says I'm interested in cosmetics, for example. People don't take the time to determine

Simple if forgotten/deleted ?

[dragisha]

if (currentUser.isNSA() || currentUser.isAnyOneOfOurICPeople()) { // show full data

}

Real bad error

[DogDude]

This is a really ugly error because for once, it affects their paying customers. If our admin data got exposed, I'm going to be asking for a discount or a refund on some advertising.

quality control?

[whodat54321]

What quality control? It's just bad coding that's done way too cheap and not field tested. Perhaps this will begin an era at FB where they have to invest in alpha testing? I could go on about how they are making the same mistakes M$ did in their heyday, but it's fun to watch tech history repeat itself.

QuickBooks support

[QuickBookssupport-0]

QuickBooks Support software is first-rate for accounting for any kind of commercial enterprise. It is popular and more easy to use than other accounting software. Install QuickBooks support [getinfos.org]