Facebook is the most used social network on the globe, a multitude of pictures being uploaded by users in their own accounts and according to a security researcher, these pictures were becoming accessible to third-party applications for iOS due to a vulnerability. Being warned about its existence, the Facebook company solved part of the problem in just 30 minutes, but not the biggest one, some applications for mobile terminals still being able to access private pictures without us knowing this.
According to the researcher, the Facebook application for iPhone has available a function called Sync photos that allows the storage of 2 GB of photos recorded on mobile terminals, they can be uploaded to a private album on the social network. It seems that exploiting this function, some third-party applications could have gained access to pictures that should have been private, so being able to download including what we didn't want others to see, all without us knowing.
Facebook mobile application has a feature called 'Sync photos' which helps us to keep a backup (up to 2GB) of our mobile photos. This feature enables the Facebook mobile application to upload all the photos taken by your mobile to your account and it would remain private until you publish it. Sync photos feature is turned on by default in some mobile phones. We can control it in the app settings. Most of us are unaware of this feature. If you don't want Facebook to back up your photos, go to app settings and turn it off.
Facebook solved the problem by creating a list of applications that can access users' private albums, but it remains for the computer security researchers to check again the functionality of the social network to see if exploiting the function in another way is not possible. If you do not want your photos to be synchronized automatically, then you can disable the function in the settings menu of the Facebook application.
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