Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App (bloomberg.com)

Sarah Frier, reporting for Bloomberg: Facebook scans the text and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, making sure it all abides by the company's rules governing content. If it doesn't, it gets blocked. The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger's practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox's Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.

"In that case, our systems detect what's going on," Zuckerberg said. "We stop those messages from going through." Some people reacted with concern on Twitter: "Was Facebook reading messages more generally?" Facebook has been under scrutiny in recent weeks over how it handles users' private data and the revelation struck a nerve. Messenger doesn't use the data from the scanned messages for advertising, the company said, but the policy may extend beyond what Messenger users expect.

Comments

Can verify

[Kludge]

I was wondering why Facebook was accessing an unindexed file on my private web server. I figured out that my son sent his friend a link to that file via Facebook.
Everything you do on there, they are watching.
     

Re:Can verify

[Penguinisto]

This is actually a part of FB's preview function (where they pop a little description and image onto the FB message right after the link.) It's similar to how most browsers (at least by default) plop a preview image to sites you visited on the default 'home' page when you open a browser.

They could be caching a copy of it, they could be leeching a copy of it, they could be sucking a copy of it up into BigData(tm) and analyzing the shit out of it, or they could just see if there some preview crap they can digest and plop into the message window.