Technical Issues

Facebook is closing out a troubling year with even more bad news. On December 14, the company revealed that a software bug had exposed the photos of millions of users to outside developers. This latest privacy misstep reportedly involves up to 1500 apps by 876 developers and may have affected as many as 6.8 million users.

For an app to be affected by the bug, it had to have been approved by Facebook to access the photos API as well as authorized by users to access their photos. A spokeswoman declined to provide a list of developers who had access to the photos to The Guardian, saying only that Facebook does not think all of them took advantage of that access while it was available.

Tomer Bar, an engineering director at Facebook, explained the details of the bug in a post on the company’s developer blog.

Tinder users can breathe easier this week. Following the Facebook hack that compromised 50 million user accounts, Tinder has announced there is "no evidence” to suggest its own accounts have been breached as a result.

On Friday, September 28, news of the hack broke. An unknown attacker, or attackers, exploited a weakness in the social network’s systems to take over millions of accounts, gaining access to their profiles, photos, friend lists and, possibly, private messages. More than 90 million users were logged out of their accounts by Facebook as a precaution, including the accounts of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. It is one of the most significant cyber attacks in Facebook’s history.

"We do not yet know whether these accounts were misused but we are continuing to look into this and will update when we learn more," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post published on Friday.

Image: CoffeeMeetsBagel

Dating App Coffee Meets Bagel no longer requires a Facebook account for users to login to the app. Now, customers can sign up using their mobile number instead, bypassing Facebook completely.

The change was effective on August 20^th.

Typically when customers sign up to a new online dating platform, they have to verify that they are a real person (to avoid the proliferation of fake accounts). Facebook has typically been part of this verification process, and provides an easy way for users to pull photos, profile information, and link personal connections with other networks of friends.

Tinder swiping sessions are more secure than ever and there’s an unlikely hero to thank: 69-year-old U.S. Senator Rob Wyden.

Wyden made news earlier this year when he released a letter demanding that Tinder resolve security issues exposed by a report from Checkmarx, a Tel Aviv-based security firm. Months later, Tinder has responded with good news for both singles and the senator, revealing recent changes to the app’s handling of images and swipe data that make it harder for sensitive information to fall into criminal hands.

Checkmarx noted two “disturbing vulnerabilities” in its original report, dated January 23, 2018:

Halloween has come early for Match.com. The venerable dating site made headlines last week for an outbreak of zombies -- zombie profiles, that is.

A report from The Verge revealed that a glitch has resurrected an unknown number of deleted Match profiles from the dead. In an interview, former Match user Jason Debiak explained his surprise when, over breakfast with his wife and daughter, an email announcing 10 new matches on a decade-old, deactivated account appeared in his inbox.

“I log in, and there I am, from 15 years prior, with less gray hair,” he said. “And my whole profile is there, everything.”

Tinder crashed for several hours on April 4^th after Facebook implemented new privacy and security restrictions, frustrating and confusing millions using the dating app.

Facebook has been facing increased scrutiny from the U.S. government after discovering major security breaches of its members’ personal information by third parties. Most recently, Facebook faced serious accusations after it was discovered that prominent research firm Cambridge Analytica stole Facebook user information from about 87 million users, including information about their political beliefs, without their knowledge or consent.

Facebook has since taken action to correct course, implementing more restrictions on its third party advertisers and partners to limit the amount of information they can access. Facebook previously allowed apps like Tinder to request user data automatically, but now that isn’t the case. Unfortunately for Tinder, this meant its users faced login errors and weren’t able to access the app at all.