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Facebook Caps Off 2018 With Yet Another Massive Privacy Scandal

According to a bombshell report in the New York Times on Tuesday, Facebooks behind-the-scenes efforts to give select corporate partners access to user data have been far more expansive than previously reported, including allowing certain third-party companies access to user contact lists and access to users private messages.

The social network allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages.

Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada have all denied knowing the full extent to which Facebook reportedly granted them access to private user data.

In some cases, the Times added, Facebook admitted that it left data-sharing functionality turned on long after the deals themselves had faded into the past, and it seems to have made some questionable decisions about their choice of partners.

According to the Times, records show that the company even shared unique user IDs with Yandex, a Russian search company, after it had terminated sharing that data with other firms due to security risks:

A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraines security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access and did not know why Facebook had allowed it to continue.

A Facebook spokesperson told the paper that the company had no reason to suspect any of the partner companies abused their privileges.

He also asserted that many of the arrangements did not violate the FTC deal, due to their mumbo-jumbo reading of the service provider exemption:

Original article
Author: Tom Mckay

We come from the future.

Tom Mckay has recently written 7 articles on similar topics including :
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