The Turkish Personal Data Protection Authority has fined the social media giant Facebook 1.65 million Turkish liras ($280,000) over a software bug that exposed millions of the social media user's private pictures to third-party app developers.
Turkey's state-run news agency said that the data breach affected almost 300,000 Facebook users in September 2018. But the company failed to take proper technical and administrative measures to protect the data and failed to notify authorities about the bug in a timely manner.
In December Facebook said that the employees had discovered a photo API bug that allowed the third-party applications to access the pictures of the social media users.
As reported by ZDnet, the company then stated that the software bug might have exposed the non-public images of 6.8 million Facebook users to around 1,500 apps built by 876 developers.
Since the company failed to take proper technical and administrative measures to protect the data and failed to notify authorities about the bug in a timely manner, the Turkish Personal Data Protection Authority to find the social networking platform.
Turkish authority also investigating the social media company for last year's data breach, which allowed anonymous hackers to steal personal details of almost 50 million users.
Even in March, this year, Facebook informed its users about another security breach. However, it admitted that hundreds of millions of users' passwords were stored in plaintext, along with plaintext passwords for millions of Instagram accounts. (With inputs from agencies)
