Facebook has had a terrible year, and even with less than a couple of weeks to go in 2018, it still can't seem to catch a break. A New York Times report has shed light on certain undisclosed aspects of the partnerships Facebook has with tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and Spotify, turning up damning evidence of how the social network gave these companies wide-ranging access to user data.
According to the Times, these arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the paper. The records were generated in 2017 by Facebook's internal system for tracking partnerships, and they show how Facebook's business partners appear to be exempt from its usual privacy rules.
The range of access varied widely, but one of the most egregious examples may be the fact that Netflix, Spotify, and the Royal Bank of Canada reportedly had the ability to read, write, and delete users' private messages. They could also see all the participants in a certain thread.
Access was first granted because of an API, launched in 2010, that was part of an early effort to build a messaging platform. This was before Facebook Messenger existed, and the idea was to have in-chat integrations with the services offered by these companies. In Spotify's case, this meant being able to send songs to your friends in your chat window.
Spotify still lets you share music through Facebook Messenger, but Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada no longer require access because the features that were to be incorporated in messages had since been deactivated. Both Netflix and Spotify say that they were unaware of the extent of the access Facebook had granted, while the Canadian bank denied any such access.
In addition, Apple had access to users' Facebook contacts and calendar entries, even if data sharing was disabled. This arrangement still exists, but like Netflix and Spotify, Apple says that it did not know of this special access, and the data would never leave a user's device anyway.
Microsoft's Bing search engine could also see the names and other profile information of a user's friends. The company told the Times that the data was used to build profiles of Facebook users on Microsoft servers, but it was for feature development purposes and not for advertising. Still, Microsoft says it has since deleted the data.
Bing's access was part of Facebook's "instant personalization" program, which has since been shut down. And while the data involved in this program was technically all already public on Facebook, the problematic part is that Microsoft, and other companies involved, continued to have access long after the program was killed off in 2014.
Taken together, all this speaks toward an indifference toward data privacy on the part of Facebook, especially in the light of a year marred by data breaches. It hasn't been prompt in cutting of access after it's no longer required, which increases the chances of data being exploited. On top of that, the Times' report highlights the risks of doing business with Facebook as its partners now have to defend their reputations and use of the data.
Facebook has responded to the allegations by saying that none of the partnerships violated users' privacy, but acknowledged it had a lot to do to regain people's trust. There was no evidence of abuse by its partners, Facebook said, and some companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo have come out to reiterate that they only used the data where appropriate.
Source: The New York Times
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