Social Media

A glitch in Facebook allows search of your female friends but not male

Written by Abdul Wahab ·  1 min read >

A new glitch in Facebook’s search function has caused it to behave in an odd way. According to a Belgium security researcher and white-hat-hacker, Inti De Ceukelaire Facebook lets you search photos of your female friends but not so for your male friends.

The Belgium security expert replicated the same glitch across several Facebook accounts to verify the error in Facebook’s search function. According to his research, when you (the user) types the keywords, “photos of my female friends” the search returns with random photos of the user’s female friends, however, when the keywords “photos of my male friends” are typed the search returns with completely different results of random other people.

We tested the claim and surprisingly the results were the same as the Belgium security expert claimed. In fact, you can try it as well to verify the authenticity of his research. It should be mentioned that Inti De Ceukelaire has had a history of exposing the glitches in security and privacy of Facebook.

In 2017, the white-hat-hacker used Facebook’s search to accurately find the personal email address of the US’s then and now first lady, Melania Trump. The interesting thing to notice is that he did not use any aggressive tools or tactics (which are common in the hacking world) on the Facebook search bar. According to his claim, he merely stumbled upon these by typing carefully-worded queries.

He also claimed that Facebook has particularly taken steps against him to stop his work as he cited that he has faced several service disruptions over the past few months. Amusingly he claimed that he simply stumbled upon this new glitch in Facebook security search by chance.

“I found that I could no longer filter by men, but it was still possible to filter by females,” said De Ceukelaire

Facebook will hopefully sort this bug as soon as possible.