If you look at other people’s Facebook profiles, this error could give you away

Cybernews has confirmed information from Twitter that Facebook mistakenly sends automatic friend requests to Facebook profiles that users visit, which could be uncomfortable for many who surreptitiously view other people’s profiles, for example, the profiles of ex-partners.

According to a study on social media stalking conducted by OnlineDoctor, almost 74% of people admitted to looking at their crushes’ social media profiles, and about half of them do so at least once a day. In addition, the study showed that 12% of people check on their ex-partners at least once a week, and 8% do it every day. Of course, those numbers can be higher because not everyone will admit to doing it.

The Cybernews research team tested whether something like this is possible.

When you look at someone’s social media profile, that person doesn’t know and will never know about it.

But a little-known bug in the platform, said to have been around for the past five years, exposes users to this behavior by automatically triggering Facebook friend requests when they visit certain profile pages.

Cybernews tested several different scenarios and proved that this bug definitely exists on Facebook’s platform.

However, it seems that the person you are somehow stalking must have their friend request settings where the platform asks “Who can send you friend requests?” set to “everyone”.

When the Cybernews team experimented with this privacy feature, it turned out that Facebook accounts whose answer to the above question was “friends of friends” did not trigger an automatic friend request to the person whose profile the team reviewed.

In the summer of 2017, Facebook users complained of dozens of random friend requests, with one user claiming to have received 700 requests in just one day.

Facebook never addressed the issue. Some blamed bots for the spike in requests, while others thought a Facebook bug was the most likely cause.

A few months later, another Facebook bug surfaced that allowed blocked users to re-send friend requests to profiles that had blocked them.

Facebook has not yet commented on this error.

Photo: Thought Catalog