Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal. The latest worrying report: According to The New York Times Facebook gave technology companies like Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify special…
Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal. The latest worrying report: According to The New York Times Facebook gave technology companies like Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify special access to user’s data without anyone else knowing.
The revelation is the latest in a string of bad news for Facebook. In just the last couple of months the company has suffered multiple outages, a reveal that it considered selling user data after pledging not to, and a bug that affected 6.8 million people giving permission to third-party apps to access their photos. And this doesn’t include the testimonies on Capitol Hill and other scandals that the company has faced this year. Now on Wednesday, the attorney general for the District of Columbia has filed a suit against Facebook for permitting political consultancy Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of tens of millions of users without their permission, according to Washington Post sources.
So here’s what we know now from the new report.
According to the Times, Facebook gave big companies greater access to its users’ data without the user’s permission. This includes giving Microsoft’s search engine Bing access to see all of a user’s friends without the user’s consent, letting Netflix and Spotify read a user’s private messages and allowing Amazon to gather names and contact information.
The Times also reports that Facebook was still sharing “streams of friends’ posts” with Yahoo “as recently as this summer” even though the Facebook claiming publicly to have stopped the practice years ago.
More: Facebook denies giving Spotify, Netflix, other tech giants wider access to data without user permission
Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, the company’s director of developer platforms and programs, denied that Facebook gave companies user data without the user’s permission. “To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission,” Papamiltiadis wrote on Facebook, adding that the company similarly did not “violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.
