It’s been a really difficult year for Facebook. Not only did it have to contend with the infamous Cambridge Analytica incident of last year, the scrutiny over its privacy tool Onavo Protect that wasn't as private as they said, as well as cybercriminals’ continued abuse of the social media tool, but there is now more. The company has started to notify more than 800,000 people that a bug may have allowed blocked persons to see what users did not intend for them to see.
The preventive or reactive action to take is to log into your account and make sure the blocked list of users you had set up before is correct for your account. If during the time this “feature” was active, a post was set to be publicly viewable or visible to friends of friends, then it’s possible that a blocked user could have seen it. If the post was set to be viewable by only friends, then it wasn’t.
Facebook said this bug was active from May 29 to June 5 and that “83% of people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked.” It has apparently been fixed, but it’s still best to check those privacy settings, just in case. And check them periodically. Facebook has a tendency to change them and some may not even notice.
Facebook did issue an apology for the error and offered up that those who were blocked were not reinstated. Whew! That would certainly cause another uproar.
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