The deals extended access for some companies after Facebook cut off most app developers in 2015, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Facebook stopped letting other companies access your friends’ data in 2015 — right?
That’s what Facebook said in March, after the social media giant came under fire for reports it had let third-party developers access data on all of a user’s connections. But The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Facebook cut special deals with some companies that let them continue to access data on its users’ friends.
The report calls into question Facebook’s previous claims that it made changes in 2015 to stop the kind of data collection that allowed a researcher at the University of Cambridge to collect information on 87 million Facebook users. The researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, recruited about 200,000 people to take a personality quiz through their Facebook accounts and his app collected information on all their friends as well. Kogan then gave that information to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook has faced increased scrutiny for sharing user data with third parties since the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, which intensified earlier this week when The New York Times reported that Facebook had shared user data with device manufacturers. That included Huawei, a Chinese phone manufacturer that’s been flagged by US intelligence agencies as a national security threat.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company reportedly told The Wall Street Journal that some of the agreements, which it called « whitelist » deals, extended access to some companies for weeks or months.
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