It seems even the founder of Facebook isn't immune to having his privacy invaded.

Personal photographs of Mark Zuckerberg were leaked online on Tuesday, showing the company's CEO with his girlfriend, his dog, and his friends. One sequence of pictures shows him holding a dead chicken, then subsequently smiling over a dinner of chicken and chips. Earlier this year the 27-year-old vowed only to eat meat he had personally killed.

According to the Daily Mail, the photos became public because of a glitch in the site's software to report inappropriate content. Reporting the photographs apparently made them available to a wider pool of users.

Facebook's spokesman said the problem had now been rectified."The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user's most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos," he said.

"This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system."

Facebook, which was created seven years ago in Mr Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room, has come under fire in recent years for sharing too much of its members' content and for having an open, rather than private, default setting for information shared by people.