To make it easy for people to manage their publicly visible information on Facebook, the social media giant is restoring the “View as Public” feature it had disabled last year owing to a major security flaw.
This week on Twitter, the social media company announced:
[xyz-ihs snippet=”public-view-fb”]
Facebook had disabled this feature late last year in response to a security flaw that allowed attackers to steal access tokens to almost 50 million users. This flaw was tied to the ‘View As’ feature that allowed users to see how their profile looked either when viewed by the public at large or with the eyes of a specific person. The firm reset the access tokens for over 90 million users in response and disabled all associated features while it investigated the breach.
“We have completed our security review and are re-enabling the version of the “View As” feature that lets people see what their profile looks like to people they aren’t friends with on Facebook. This version was unaffected by the security incident and was significantly more popular than “View as Specific Person.
While the “View as Public” feature has returned, the “View as Specific Person” feature won’t be coming back, which is where the flaw originated. With Facebook sharing such a brief update, it sounds like no more than the previously accounted for 50 million users were affected by the vulnerability—The feature is intended to inform users what information will be shown off to other people, particularly those who aren’t friends with them. With certain privacy settings on, users can limit the information that non-friend users can see when browsing their profiles.
The new features are rolling out to all users, so you might want to see if you have the new features available via an app update
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