Facebook bug may have leaked photos of 6.8 million users

A Facebook API bug has reportedly leaked pictures of approximately 6.8 million users by the help of some third-party apps.

The social media giant in a blog post said that the bug gave developers access to photos of users, shared apart from their timelines, such as those on Marketplace or Facebook Stories. The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post.

"Our internal team discovered a photo API bug that may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos. We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018," the blog post read.

"Currently, we believe this may have affected up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers. The only apps affected by this bug were ones that Facebook approved to access the photos API and that individuals had authorised to access their photos," it further read.

The company apologised for the inconvenience caused to their users due to the bug and assured that by next week the Facebook team would be rolling out tools for app developers that will allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug.

"We will be working with those developers to delete the photos from impacted users," Facebook said.

The team also promised to notify users impacted by this bug via an alert on Facebook. The notification will direct them to a Help Center link where they'll be able to see if they've used any apps that were affected by the bug.

In addition, they also recommended users to log into apps with which they have shared their Facebook photos to check which photos they have access to.