Facebook Acknowledges It Shared User Data With Dozens of Companies (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Facebook has admitted providing dozens of tech companies with special access to user data after publicly saying it restricted such access in 2015. Facebook continued sharing information with 61 hardware and software makers after it said it discontinued the practice in May 2015, the social networking giant acknowledged in 747 pages of documents delivered to Congress late Friday. The documents were in response to hundreds of questions posed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by members of Congress in April.

Facebook said it granted a special "one-time" six-month extension to companies that ranged from AOL to package-delivery service United Parcel Service to dating app Hinge so they could come into compliance with the social network's new privacy policy and create their own versions of Facebook for their devices. Data shared without users' knowledge included friends' names, genders and birth dates. Facebook's documents also said it had discovered that five other companies "theoretically could have accessed limited friends' data" as a result of a beta test. Facebook said in the documents it has ended 38 of the partnerships and plans to discontinue seven more by the end of July.

Comments

What a big surprise, NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anyone surprised Facebook did this? When you sign up for a free service that obviously requires lot's of money to operate.That company will find ways to sell your information as a commodity in order to stay in business. In fact you could argue this was Facebook's plan all along was to create a site to collect personal data and then sell it as a service to companies wanting it.

Re:What a big surprise, NOT

[bill_mcgonigle]

The only surprise from a civics perspective is that they risked Contempt of Congress with their CEO. But he's rich and lawyered-up and apparently Congress converted their jail to a conference room eighty years ago, so from a reality perspective it's not a surprise at all. Still, lots of people think Congress is "doing their job" by grilling the Zuck, so none of the players lose except those people who are merely placated.

Re: What a big surprise, NOT

[houghi]

It is not that they did it. It is that they first said they did not. The interesting thing will be how non-EU countries are going to deal with it.
In the EU we now have the GDPR and clicking on a button or not clicking on something was ever a contract.

My guess is that the US will, as always, chhose the side of the people who voted for them. 1$=1vote.

Re:What a big surprise, NOT

[alvinrod]

Congress knows that if it went after these people and started handing out hard prison time for corporate malfeasance that they'd soon have no one to shake down for brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions. Actually solving the problem isn't particularly useful to a representative so long as they can appear to be "acting tough" which is just as effective in terms of getting votes and means that they can continue to "act tough" in the future since the problem remains. Everyone can point fingers and blame everyone else and no one ever needs to actually be held responsible.

I was thinking "why is this even news"...

[Anonymous Coward]

... then I realised, the news isn't that Facebook shared the data, it's that Facebook admitted it.

we have one of these headlines one a month

[nimbius]

Frankly this is hardly news, let alone tech news. Facebook has been from its very inception a tool to harvest personal data for sale as analytic data to corporations seeking to exploit the human condition in the sale and marketing of products and services. The simplest way to curtail this behavior is to stop using facebook. There is no legislative process, no interlocutory system of plugins and ad blocking, and no personal privacy setting that is more powerful or directly effective.

Re:we have one of these headlines one a month

[alvinrod]

The problem is that even if you yourself don't use Facebook, if enough of your relatives or friends use it, they can probably build a pretty good profile on you as well. Even better from their perspective if no one is trying to control their privacy settings. I really wonder what the default settings about sharing information are for non-users.

obvious, but only in retrospect

[davecb]

That wasn't the expectation when it started: it was an on-line version of the college yearbook, run on a shoestring. It was named after the Harvard student directory, thus the name.

It grew, and added universities first, funding itself privately and then via venture capital, and only then business pages, making it a recruiting supplier (like linkedin) and then an advertiser. Eventually it added high schools, and finally anyone.

It's customers were the "slowly boiled frogs" of the fable: only now is it obvious that facebook became a spy service at some time in the past.