The latest privacy scandal on Facebook, from a bug that exposed the private posts of 14 million users of the social network, came a day after it was confirmed that Facebook had entered into data-sharing agreements with Chinese companies. 
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, after all, seems like it happened years ago.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s approach still doesn’t seem to be working, or has so many gray areas in privacy that it will take years to sort them out. After all, turning a cruise ship around isn’t something that happens immediately.
There’s a saying about Facebook: “It’s easier to apologize than to ask for permission.”
Of course, we can’t say that every privacy problem is intentional on Facebook’s part. Mistakes happen, and that’s perfectly normal. For Facebook, however, this means that over 2 billion users are affected, and we are talking about incredibly personal information.
It should be noted that Facebook most of the time does not even apologize. But after the latest revelation, the head of privacy, Erin Egan, came out and apologized:
We recently discovered a bug that was automatically sending posts to public. We have fixed this issue and starting today, we are notifying everyone to review their posts. To be clear, the bug did not affect any old posts. We would like to apologize for this error.
Facebook’s post attempting to explain the error is titled “An Update on the Audience Selector Error.” There’s no apology, no promise that it will never happen again, and no explanation of what caused the error. The post ends :
We've heard loud and clear that we need to be more transparent about how we build our products and how those products use your data – even when things go wrong. And that's what we're doing.
So, Facebook once again seems to have become an expert at “not asking for permission” and we have seen it time and time again. Let’s recall the psychological tests of the social network that were carried out without anyone knowing anything.
Of course, what followed was again an apology. It is an “art” that Facebook seems to have mastered very well.
