Facebook allowed companies to see users' friends and private messages

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed.
By Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore
Dec. 18, 2018

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s 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.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.

...

[donkeypoofed]

1. When you dont pay for a product, you ARE the product!!

I'm just so glad I never bothered with it.

Zuckerberg himself said, while just starting FB in college and amazed at how the users didn't care about giving him their personal info - called them all "dumb fuckers ". Yeah, he meant you if you're a FB user.

[Luciferous]

2. I don't understand why people still use Facebook

[Hassler]

3. Zuck is so friendly to Russia, you have to wonder what Putin has on him.

[Quixote1818]

4. If people had there stuff set for private or among friends, this seems blatantly illegal. nt

[.99center]

5. Facebook gave access to unique user IDs to a Russian search engine

Link to tweet

[dalton99a]

6. +1

[Vinca]

7. Time for another platform for people.