Los Angeles — Popular US online video streaming service Hulu has discontinued its Facebook Connect feature from its website after some users saw the profile photo and email address of other users instead of their own when connecting their accounts, according to Znet reports.
Facebook Connect permits users to log-in to a particular website using their Facebook credentials. The feature was introduced to enable users to post comments on Hulu videos on their Facebook accounts and share favorite shows with their Facebook friends.
Hulu activated Facebook Connect on its website over the weekend but was soon compelled to remove the functionality after it discovered a technical glitch, which affected a limited number of Hulu users. Hulu said the glitch was a coding error, not the result of a hack.
The company acknowledged that they have discovered an issue that caused some Hulu users to gain temporary access to other members’ accounts. However, Hulu stresses that this was not the work of hackers, and that no sensitive user information such as passwords or credit card numbers were lost.
A post on the Hulu Blog explains the snafu:
“When we launched our Facebook Connect feature early this morning, we discovered that a small number of users were not seeing their own Hulu account information upon login,” Richard Tom, vice president of platform technology at Hulu, said in a Friday blog post. “We are still drilling down on the precise nature of the issue, but we know that it was a coding and configuration error on Hulu’s side, and not the result of hacking, or other third party actions, or a vulnerability in Facebook Connect.”
When I attempted to connect my Hulu and Facebook accounts the other day, for instance, I could not remember my Hulu password. After a few tries, a pop-up window appeared and displayed the photo and email address for a woman named Sharon. It did not provide any other additional information about her, and I clicked the “Not Sharon?” link to re-set my own password, but I imagine Sharon would not want Hulu sharing her email address with random tech journalists.
Hulu said it has “been able to confirm approximately 50 affected users whose profile data, including email addresses, could have been accessed.” No one, however, gained access to Hulu’s main system or highly sensitive user data like credit card information, the company said.
For now, Hulu has discontinued Facebook Connect but promises to relaunch the feature once all the kinks have been worked out. Privacy settings for those who connected their Hulu and Facebook accounts, meanwhile, will be upgraded to “the most restrictive settings,” Hulu said. Users are asked to log into Hulu using their Hulu account data, in the meantime.
“We are also taking the preventive measure of resetting privacy settings to the most restrictive settings for anyone who logged into their Hulu account through Facebook during the affected period,” Hulu wrote.
“Once we are certain that the issue has been fully addressed, we will restore our Facebook Connect program,” Tom wrote. “We apologize to any affected users, and we intend to do everything we can to make it right and avoid similar issues in the future.”
Furthermore, Hulu introduced Facebook Connect with partners Coors Light and Microsoft search engine Bing, which also sponsored a free month of Hulu Plus subscriptions as a bonus for users to sign in via Facebook.