Have you ever added one of your photos to a Facebook group? If yes, you might want to delete your photo albums right now. I discovered today that the Facebook privacy settings for photos do not work.
Inspired by a discussion about social media I heard on NPR, I went into Facebook to do a thorough check and re-check of all of my privacy settings. Guess what?
Dozens of photos I have on my Timeline are now publicly available. >:{ Every one of those photos is set to “Friends” only privacy. When I click the “View As…” option and then “Public”, all of those photos are now appearing on my public Timeline profile.
To confirm this, I registered a fake account that has no friends. I viewed my own profile using that new account and a different web browser. When I scrolled down far enough on the Timeline, my old photos started showing up to this newly registered user!
The fake user gets nothing by clicking on the “Photos” section near the top, suggesting this bug is specific to the new Timeline profile feature.
In an unsuccessful attempt to hide the photos, I used my real account to reset the album privacy to “Only Me”. At this point, the photos were still appearing in the public preview as well as the fake account viewing my real profile.