[kerng]

Your are mixing things up.... In this situation the hacker is Facebook.

Most of the other Facebook data breaches where they didn't secure data accordingly would compare more to what you refer to.

This case is different though as Facebook performed unauthorized actions on email accounts, basically breaking in.

[product50]

I am making a case for the OP's comment that Facebook may have made a genuine mistake by introducing this bug - like they literally called out in their statement.

A bug is a bug. Whether it allows a hacker to sneak in to steal all your data or whether it allows a company to collect data it wasn't supposed to (as in this case Facebook specifically mentioned that it didn't turn off the feature though it intended to).

[jimsmart]

> in this case Facebook specifically mentioned that it didn't turn off the feature though it intended to

What you are describing here is in fact a lack of action, or a lack of change policy (to cause such action). That's not a bug. A bug is unintentional behaviour of some code, not some folk who've said they'll do something, but then don't.

And as for whether the original behaviour is/was a bug is also a point of contention too: that's a lot of willfully bad behaviour that's got chained together somehow to do what it did, then reviewed, signed off, and deployed — that's quite some 'accident' — I write code, and to me this whole thing just smells of a cover-up (by FB calling this a 'bug', when it very much looks to be otherwise).