Zuckerberg's private Facebook photos go public

London: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's private photos were made public after a web expert managed to gain access to his page due to a glitch in the site, a media report said Wednesday.

The bug in the website's photo reporting tool — which Facebook says was only temporary and has now been fixed — meant that users could access others' pictures even if they were private.

Users were able to look at the private photos by ‘reporting' a profile picture as ‘inappropriate', which then saw other photos displayed, such as those of Zuckerberg, the Daily Mail reported.

A Facebook spokesman told CNET, a tech media website, that the glitch happened because of ‘one of our most recent code pushes' but it was only live for a short time and ‘not all content was accessible'.

The glitch and resulting private photos of Zuckerberg went viral when software engineer Mike Rundle, of Raleigh, North Carolina, posted a link to them on photo-sharing website Imgur.

Expensive treat

Zuckerberg's girlfriend Priscilla Chan is pictured in most of the photos. Some of them can be viewed publicly on his public Facebook profile, but others are said to be private.

The 27-year-old, of Palo Alto, California, has a staggering fortune of $17.5 billion (Dh63.1 billion) and treated himself to a $7 million five-bedroom, five bathroom home earlier this year in May.

The New York dentist's son has lived in Palo Alto almost continuously since he moved Facebook to Silicon Valley straight from his Harvard dormitory room in 2004.

Meanwhile, Facebook is working to fix a security flaw that let people view other users' private photos, including those of Zuckerberg.

Top priority

"The privacy of our user's data is a top priority for us, and we invest significant resources in protecting our site and the people who use it," the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement.

Facebook, which has more than 800 million users, is taking steps to improve privacy after agreeing last month to settle complaints by the Federal Trade Commission that it failed to protect user data or disclose how it could be used. In a blog posting at the time, Zuckerberg said the company should have been more vigilant in protecting users' privacy and that Facebook had made "a bunch of mistakes."

Blogs including Cnet's ZDnet posted photos from Zuckerberg's personal collection.