Facebook API Bug Deletes Contact Info On Phones

An anonymous reader writes "If you thought that Facebook's recent unannounced change of its users' email address tied with their account to Facebook ones was bad, you'll be livid if you check your mobile phone contacts and discover that the change has deleted the email addresses of many of your friends. According to Facebook, the glitch was due to a bug in its application-programming interface, and causes the last added email address to be pulled and added to the user's phone Contacts. The company says they are working hard at fixing the problem, but in the meantime, a lot of users have effectively lost some of the information stored on their devices."

Comments

Re:The real issue is with permissions

[bbecker23]

Permissions Denied has always worked well for me in limiting unwanted permissions. Admittedly, a third-party app shouldn't be needed for this, but solutions are out there.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stericson.permissions&hl=en

Re:BUG??

[ackthpt]

Sorry, 'bug'? Isn't that a bit like saying a behavioural 'bug' caused Facebook to kick my grandmother in the shin? (Which I don't doubt they would do if there was money in it.)

I'm under the impression it was originally planned to replace all your contacts email addresses with the new and improved friendxyz@facebook.com email addresses .. so they can, you know, route all of your email and use it for harvesting yet more information from you.