Facebook leaks photo ID on musicians' pages

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 6 May 2008 at 07:26

Those running musicians' profiles on Facebook have found their driving licences accidentally posted in public view, according to reports.

The social networking site allows musicians to post their own music and images for promotional purposes, in a similar way to sites like MySpace. However, Facebook first requires that users upload photographic identification as a precaution against copyright infringement.

Several people have now found that these scanned images of their driving licences are appearing in public view on artists' pages, claims ValleyWag.

One employee of Ping Pong music discovered that his details were exposed, and says that at least two other people have been affected.

"A code change accidentally caused a limited number of private ID card photos to be surfaced on live Facebook Pages. Facebook regrets that this happened and has removed all exposed images of ID cards from the site," says a Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook has had previous problems with privacy and security. Late last year 50,000 users signed a petition urging the site to develop better controls to censor what information was available to others, and a feature called Beacon was found to be tracking browsing habits.

"With Beacon we just screwed it up," admitted Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations at Facebook, at the time. "It was just poor execution on our part."