Facebook Gave Netflix And Spotify Access To Users’ Private Messages, FYI

Not cool.

According to this report from the New York Times, Facebook royally screwed up again. Well not again. It screwed up more than initially thought.

The social media giant reportedly gave out more personal data than it let on.

NYT: 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 & interviewshttps://t.co/1AlJiowkbM

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) December 19, 2018

Facebook gave at least Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages. Users tend to think their messages are private but FB views users as data sets. As users learn this it could lead to the biggest uproar they’ve faced @Facebook. https://t.co/0ye4p49x7F

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 19, 2018

A bombshell New York Times report reveals Facebook gave preferred customers even more access to personal user data than was previously made public, painting the most complete picture yet of how the company views privacy. https://t.co/1YQWk4CGNI

— Axios (@axios) December 19, 2018

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 really bad. The search engine Bing got to see users’ “friends” WITHOUT consent, and Facebook and Spotify got access to users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

In summary, “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.

This is bad. Facebook promised it was fixing its privacy issues, but after seeing this, how are we supposed to believe or trust it? It clearly doesn’t care. Facebook is your Daddy, and it’ll do what it wants. That much is abundantly clear.

h/t NYT