Giving a whole new meaning to slipping into your DMs. Facebook has admitted that for years major corporations have had access to users’ private content and contact information.
A report posted on New York Times has revealed that Facebook has been giving companies like Netflix, Spotify and the Times itself access to 2.2. billion users’ private Facebook messages and other personal data. It was revealed that between 2010 and 2018 Facebook gave over 150 companies access to personal data. An excerpt from the report reveals:
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.
Facebook responded to the report in a lengthy blog post titled “Let’s Clear Up a Few Things About Facebook’s Partners.” The post reassured users that none of the companies that had access to the data abused it.
In the post, Director of Developer Platforms and Programs, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, shared “Did partners get access to messages? Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature.”
A spokesperson for Netflix has released a statement addressing the situation, sharing:
“Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social. One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so.”
I just have one question. If Netflix are reading my personal messages, why isn’t Nutty Professor II: The Klumps on their streaming service?
