Facebook patches the Pages Manager bug that made private photos public

Facebook has finally patched the critical bug in its Pages Manager app for Android that made images sent via private messages public. The engineers working for the social networking website are now working towards removing the images that were made public on the Pages erroneously.

In an email to Android Police , Facebook Security has confirmed that a fix for the flaw has been released. The patch has been released through the server, so you will not receive an app update on your phone. You can now go about sending private images through messages without the worry of them becoming public.

All patched up now

The guys over at Facebook Security have said that they’re also looking at photos that were made public because of the flaw. Once confirmed, Facebook will be taking the photos down pronto. The mail said that the issue cropped up after a server-side change was made a week ago. This is when grievances started pouring in on the app’s page on Google Play Store as well. Facebook has promised to look into the matter and conduct a review to investigate how all of this happened in order to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

“There’s some overlap between security and privacy, and while this may not have been a vulnerability for an attacker to exploit, it’s certainly the sort of issue we’d want to know about,” Rory from the Security team wrote.

We put the fix to test with the same methods we used earlier. Unlike last time, the private image I sent to my colleague through my page did not make its way to the wall again. Previously I had put various methods of replying to a fan through the page to test, including the Android Pages Manager app, the iOS one as well as the web. The flaw seemed to be present only in the Android version of the app. You can heave a sigh of relief and go about interacting with your fans using the Andrioid version of Facebook Pages Manager now.