Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- The report is based on internal documents and interviews with former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.
- It shows how Facebook gave more than 100 tech companies access to user data that goes beyond the scope that the social media giant had previously disclosed.
- Below are some tips for how you can prevent Facebook from sharing your personal data.
A new report shows how Facebook gave its partnering tech companies “more intrusive” access to user data than previously disclosed, including access to private messages.
The New York Times obtained hundreds of pages of documents and interviewed about 50 former employees of Facebook and its partners for its report. It reveals how the social media giant opened up its massive cache of user data to major tech companies in order to boost profits and gain users.
Facebook never quite sold its users’ data, but it did grant “other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests,” the report states. One example is Facebook’s partnership with Spotify, a music-streaming platform on which new users can easily create an account using their Facebook sign-in information.
Partnerships like this were part of a long-term strategy to “weave Facebook’s services into other sites and platforms, believing it would stave off obsolescence and insulate Facebook from competition,” according to the report.
In many cases, Facebook’s partner companies had access to users’ friends lists, contact information and, in the case of Netflix and Spotify, private messages. These third-party companies often didn’t obtain permission from Facebook users to access their information. That’s possibly because Facebook, in a legal sense, considered its partners to be extensions of itself. Therefore, the companies weren’t in violation of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred Facebook from sharing users’ data without permission.
Photo: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images
Protestors from the pressure group Avaaz demonstrate outside Portcullis house where Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is to be questioned by members of parliament in London on April 26, 2018.
Not everyone agrees.
“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau, told The…
The post Facebook gave Spotify and Netflix access to users’ private messages appeared first on FeedBox.