Facebook allowed nearly 60 device makers including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, BlackBerry, HTC and Microsoft to access personal information of users and their friends.
Facebook is trouble again. Just weeks after the company co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by the European Union parliamentarians over the company’s data privacy practices, a new report suggests that the social media giant allowed nearly 60 device makers including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, BlackBerry, HTC and Microsoft to access personal information of users and their friends.
According to a report by The New York Times, the company struck agreements with phone makers before the Facebook apps were widely popular among its users. These agreements while giving the precious user information to the manufacturers allowed the company to expand its reach by offering people popular features such as the address book and messaging option.
As per the report, Facebook allowed the manufacturers to access the data of user’s friend without their «explicit consent» even after it declared that it would no longer be sharing such information with outsiders. During its investigation, the English daily found out that most of these deals remained in effect even after the company started winding them down in wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the private information of 87 million users was compromised.
In the days following the time when Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out, Facebook prohibited the developers from accessing information from users’ friend. However, as per the NYT report, it exempted the device makers from all such restrictions.
These deals raise concern about the company’s privacy protection and compliance with a 2011 decree with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) where the agency had found the social media giant of violating several claims. At the time, the agency had found Facebook guilty of sharing information with advertisers even as it claimed it didn’t. Besides this, FTC also found the company guilty of giving third-party apps access to nearly all of users’ personal information including the data they didn’t need. The company also allowed access to information such as photos and videos even after the user account had been deleted or deactivated. The FTC decree barred Facebook from making any deceptive claims and directed it to obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors every two years for next 20 years.
Meanwhile, Facebook confirmed some parts of the story and refuted others. Ime Archibong, Facebook’s Vice President of Product Partnerships in a blog wrote that while the company did built a set of device-integrated APIs that allowed device makers to recreate Facebook-like experience on their individual devices or operating systems, the partners signed agreements which restricted them from using user data for any other purpose.
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«Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends. We are not aware of any abuse by these companies,» Archibong wrote in the blog adding that the company had already ended 22 of the 60 partnerships with these device manufacturers.
