On Friday, hundreds of Facebook users took to Twitter to complain that Facebook automatically sent friend requests on their behalf. According to the complainants, Facebook sent friend requests to people they may know after viewing their profiles.
What this means is that, once you view the profiles of anyone who isn’t already added as your friend, Facebook would automatically send a request suggesting that you want to befriend the person. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, acknowledged the glitch and announced that the error had been corrected.
“We fixed a bug related to a recent app update that caused some Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly,” the social media giant wrote on Friday. “We’ve stopped this from happening and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Many Facebook users complained that they were embarrassed by the issue because it meant they were caught snooping on the profiles of people on Facebook. The complainants considered the breach a privacy issue because they believe they should be able to snoop on anyone without being caught doing so.
One complainant tweeted, “Facebook, are you going to sort out this new friend request glitch?! 4 requests were sent today, and all I have done is clicked on a profile, I’ve also had a few sent to me. Surely this is a privacy issue! #Facebook”. Another tweeter did not also find the development funny at all. “Facebook is probably in breach of some privacy laws with the new glitch — notifying people you viewed their profile and giving them unsolicited access to your private profile data,” they stated.
A media outlet, Review Geek, warned Facebook users to stay away from visiting the pages of other people while the bug lasted.
“This bug occurs so quickly that you’ll hardly notice it,” the outlet reported. “Upon visiting a stranger’s profile, the ‘Add Friend’ button automatically changes itself to ‘Pending.’ There isn’t a warning, a popup, or anything else that indicates you’ve sent a friend request. The only way to avoid the bug is to avoid strangers’ Facebook profiles.”