Instagram fixes flaw that let people see your private photos

Instagram’s approach to privacy is nothing like the piecemeal strategy used by parent company Facebook. On the photo-sharing service, your privacy settings are limited to public and private—or at least that’s what we thought. Instagram just fixed a bug that let people see your private photos if they had once been public.

Quartz discovered the flaw and asked Instagram about it, prompting the Friday fix. Before the hole was patched, if you shared web links to your photos when your account was public and then decided to go private, those links would still lead to publicly viewable images. The hole was only exploitable on the web, not in Instagram’s iOS and Android apps.

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