Facebook Let Netflix & Spotify Read Your Private Messages, Apple & Amazon Received Your Contact

Sigh. At this point, it makes more sense to ask what Facebook HASN'T done to violate customer privacy, than what it has.

In a latest report by The New York Times, it seems Facebook gave other businesses a lot more info about you than you know.

Reuters

According to the piece, Facebook had business partnerships with companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, and Netflix that it was sharing data with.

Much more of your data than was ever indicated. Additionally, it continued doing this years after it was supposed to have stopped.

Here's an excerpt from the NYT report:

"The documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission."

ALSO READ: 6.8 Million Facebook User's Photos Leaked Last Week, Here's How To Check If You Are Affected

"In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies - most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year."

According to the reporting, Apple was given access to users' Facebook contacts and calendar items, even if they'd disabled data sharing. Apple claims it didn't know it had any special access, and never took any data of that kind off a user's device.

Also Read: Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Resigning As Facebook CEO, Despite Shareholder Unease & Privacy Scandal

Amazon on the other hand supposedly received users' names and contact details. That partnership is in fact still active, and only now being phased out. The ecommerce giant has also refused to comment on it used that data, except to say it was done "appropriately".

Giving Amazon the names and contact information of users, in a partnership that is currently being wound down. Amazon wouldn't discuss how it used the data other than to say it had used it "appropriately."

Microsoft search engine Bing was given access to the names and profiles of a user's, which the company says it's long-since deleted.

Even worse though, the likes of Spotify, Netflix, and others were allowed to read users' private Facebook messages.

Yeah, let that soak in for a second. Facebook says this was so people could log into these services with their Facebook accounts and send messages through the Spotify app. Because that's a thing people have used copiously eh? Also, I love messaging people on Netflix. It's such a minimalist text interface. As in it's non-existent.

"Did partners get access to messages? Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner's messaging feature," the company said in follow-up blog post. "Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify's desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person's messages in order to power this type of feature."

NYT was also able to get its hands on internal Facebook documents, which showed Spotify could see the messages of more than 70 million Facebook users a month. Additional, it and other partnered companies like Netflix could read, write, and even delete users' messages.

We shouldn't need to tell you just how horrifying this news is. Facebook and its partnered companies are trying to paint this as a simple healthy business ecosystem. Except users like you are not the apex predator here, you're the abundant prey. For Facebook to allow other third parties to access user data that's been deliberately left private is just one point of contention. For it to do that without explicitly informing users or gaining their permission first is infuriatingly violating.

And to make everything worse, this is just link number 7 or 8 in a chain of negligence and greed. A chain that Facebook will probably use to end up strangling itself soon if this keeps up.