Facebook pages give a social presence to the celebrities and public figures, usually those pages are managed by unknown profiles.
Facebook doesn't reveal the publisher or admin id, picture or role in the page management unless the owner decides to make them public.
However, a bug that revealed the accounts running the pages became functional on Thursday evening and lasted till Friday morning.
A flaw in the social network isn't something new, the company fixed the bug as soon as their security research team found it, but by that time, the screenshots of accounts running the prominent pages went viral on several image hosting sites, including Imgur.
The trick was to open the target page and check the edit history to see the Admins or accounts edited each post.
Facebook said that we are thankful for our security researcher who pointed out the bug that displays the account info of the publishers on the history edit page.
As per Facebook, the bug was invented because of a code update which the company implemented on Thursday.
The bug wasn't exposed for everybody since it had to be found by navigating in the page settings and by looking for something unusual.
Even though the bug was fixed within 24hours, the screenshots had already gone viral on Imgur, 4chan and different social platforms, displaying the accounts behind the official pages of celebrities and public figures.
Pages which suffered the privacy breach include the official page of Justin Trudeau, Hillary Clinton, climate activist Greta Thunberg, hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg and many more.
Photo: Zerohedge.
Facebook tried to reduce the panic and stress by saying that only name and public profile link were available on the edit page, which was not supposed to be there anyway.
But, it is indeed an alarming situation for users who run anti-government pages.
Lukasz Olejnik, who is a privacy expert and research assistant at the Oxford University's department for Technology and Global Affairs, says that it is a panicking situation for admins of sensitive pages.
He said that it would have been a good idea to run these pages through fake profiles.
It was an unexpected error, but the admins of sensitive pages should now consider their profiles to be known, Lukasz further added.
Facebook is gradually expanding its bug and security research team as it not precisely the first time when security and privacy concerns have raised.
To avoid such flaws, Facebook is steadily expanding its bug bounty, which motivates freelance hackers and researchers to find and report glitches to the company for rewards and recognition.
Even though such improvements take time, it's necessary to take actions to keeps data of 2.449 Billion users in safe hands.
Read next: Facebook’s New Privacy Tool Only Scratches Surface, More Changes Must Happen
Facebook doesn't reveal the publisher or admin id, picture or role in the page management unless the owner decides to make them public.
However, a bug that revealed the accounts running the pages became functional on Thursday evening and lasted till Friday morning.
A flaw in the social network isn't something new, the company fixed the bug as soon as their security research team found it, but by that time, the screenshots of accounts running the prominent pages went viral on several image hosting sites, including Imgur.
The trick was to open the target page and check the edit history to see the Admins or accounts edited each post.
Facebook said that we are thankful for our security researcher who pointed out the bug that displays the account info of the publishers on the history edit page.
As per Facebook, the bug was invented because of a code update which the company implemented on Thursday.
The bug wasn't exposed for everybody since it had to be found by navigating in the page settings and by looking for something unusual.
Even though the bug was fixed within 24hours, the screenshots had already gone viral on Imgur, 4chan and different social platforms, displaying the accounts behind the official pages of celebrities and public figures.
Pages which suffered the privacy breach include the official page of Justin Trudeau, Hillary Clinton, climate activist Greta Thunberg, hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg and many more.
Photo: Zerohedge.
Facebook tried to reduce the panic and stress by saying that only name and public profile link were available on the edit page, which was not supposed to be there anyway.
But, it is indeed an alarming situation for users who run anti-government pages.
Lukasz Olejnik, who is a privacy expert and research assistant at the Oxford University's department for Technology and Global Affairs, says that it is a panicking situation for admins of sensitive pages.
He said that it would have been a good idea to run these pages through fake profiles.
It was an unexpected error, but the admins of sensitive pages should now consider their profiles to be known, Lukasz further added.
Facebook is gradually expanding its bug and security research team as it not precisely the first time when security and privacy concerns have raised.
To avoid such flaws, Facebook is steadily expanding its bug bounty, which motivates freelance hackers and researchers to find and report glitches to the company for rewards and recognition.
Even though such improvements take time, it's necessary to take actions to keeps data of 2.449 Billion users in safe hands.
Read next: Facebook’s New Privacy Tool Only Scratches Surface, More Changes Must Happen
