Facebook Denies Giving Tech Companies Access To Users’ Private Information Without Permission

The big news of the day? Facebook has been accused of sharing users’ private information with other tech companies without explicit permission. We’re even talking about a users’ private DMs. That’s right. Netflix and Spotify got access to users’ private messages.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

It’s a huge scandal.

Facebook has responded. It’s denying the reports. Kinda.

Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs Konstantinos Papamiltiadis wrote in part:

Today, we’re facing questions about whether Facebook gave large tech companies access to people’s information and, if so, why we did this.

To put it simply, this work was about helping people do two things. First, people could access their Facebook accounts or specific Facebook features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple, Amazon, Blackberry and Yahoo. These are known as integration partners. Second, people could have more social experiences – like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends – on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora and Spotify.

To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.

You can read the entire explanation here.

PS– he admits that companies got access to users’ private messages:

Did partners get access to messages?

Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. 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.

Additionally:

In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, Netflix denied the claims in the Times report. “At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so,” said the company.

Spotify said in a statement they have no evidence Spotify ever accessed any private messages. “Spotify cannot read users’ private Facebook inbox messages across any of our current integrations,” they said.

This is far from over. Stay tuned.

h/t USA Today

*note– this post has been updated