While Facebook is trying hard to be the one social network to rule them all with universal net features such as the “Like” button, perhaps its greatest obstacle is ongoing privacy concerns. Exacerbating the issue were reports of a new exploit that allows users to view their friends’ private chats, forcing Facebook to disable the service temporarily.
For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the ‘preview my profile’ feature of Facebook privacy settings, read a statement from Facebook. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.
Source: TechCrunch
