Facebook Wanted Banks To Fork Over Customer Data Passing Through Messenger (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: For years, Facebook has publicly positioned its Messenger application as a way to connect with friends and as a way to help customers interact directly with businesses. But a new report from The Wall Street Journal today indicates that Facebook also saw its Messenger platform as a siphon for the sensitive financial data of its users, information it would not otherwise have access to unless a customer interacted with, say, a banking institution over chat. In this case, the WSJ report says not only did the banks find Facebook's methods obtrusive, but the companies also pushed back against the social network and, in some cases, moved conversations off Messenger to avoid handing Facebook any sensitive data. Among the financial firms Facebook is said to have argued with about customer data are American Express, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

The report says Facebook was interested in helping banks create bots for its Messenger platform, as part of a big push in 2016 to turn the chat app into an automated hub of digital life that could help you solve problems and avoid cumbersome customer service calls. But some of these bots, like the one American Express developed for Messenger last year, deliberately avoided sending transaction information over the platform after Facebook made clear it wanted to use customer spending habits as part of its ad targeting business. In some cases, companies like PayPal and Western Union negotiated special contracts that would let them offer many detailed and useful services like money transfers, the WSJ reports. But by and large, big banks in the U.S. have reportedly shied away from working with Facebook due to how aggressively it pushed for access to customer data. Facebook said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal: "Like many online companies, we partner with financial institutions to improve people's commerce experiences, like enabling better customer service, and people opt into these experiences. We've emphasized to partners that keeping people's information safe and secure is critical to these efforts. That has been and always will be our priority."

Comments

"Hasn't Opted Out" is Not The Same As "Opt-in"

[ewhac]

...people opt into these experiences... [emphasis mine]

"Opt-in," my pasty white ass.

There are a shit-ton of "experiences" on Facebook that I haven't "opted in" to. Indeed, when I try to turn them off, Facebook turns them right back on again (most notably "Most Recent" versus "Top Stories", and "Login via profile picture"). Facebook should be trusted with precisely nothing.

Re:"Hasn't Opted Out" is Not The Same As "Opt-in"

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

There are a shit-ton of "experiences" on Facebook that I haven't "opted in" to. Indeed, when I try to turn them off, Facebook turns them right back on again (most notably "Most Recent" versus "Top Stories", and "Login via profile picture"). Facebook should be trusted with precisely nothing.

You're quite right. And it's even worse. While I like Facebook in that it's a good way to be able to contact distant friends and relatives from time to time and sometimes people I know do actually post interesting things there, I really wonder what exactly Zuckerberg is thinking. Facebook has become a lot less user friendly, and it's get worse all the time. Now, if you start to write up a post and change your mind, too bad. You can change the contents but you can't not post something. If you don't click to post it once you start writing, it will just basically hang there forever. In the past you could start writing something, change your mind, and get rid of it. Not any more. Another problem is cutting and pasting. Myself and a few other people have had problems where a cut and paste attempt failed to overwrite something previously in the buffer on the PC and when we pasted into Facebook, something we didn't want to paste got there. And you can't remove it if it's a link. So I had a link to something about a Disney film in a post that had nothing to do with Disney or movies because I had previously copied the link to put in an email I sent and my attempt to cut and paste something different into the buffer to use in my Facebook post failed. I don't get how not letting you undo stuff is making the whole experience better, Zuckerberg.

For the subject at hand, I don't really understand why people would want to contacts banks and credit card companies from within Facebook and then expect that Facebook won't try to get their info. I didn't think it required an extraordinary IQ to realize that anything you do in Facebook is subject to Facebook knowing about it. Maybe people are just a lot stupider than I realized.

Facebook == Ultra Middleman

[rtb61]

They really are sickos at facebook, they wanted to become the ultra middle men, between all customers and all suppliers. Not honest ones either but lying to both to maximise the middle man cut, either end getting shit, whilst they suck up all the profits, total power, total control, nothing but idiot psychopaths temporarily corrupt the human digital medium. You use Facebook and you are part of the problem, you are an idiot, dragging the rest of us with you, you know better, yet you still give away the privacy of everyone you interact with.

This kind of invasion and manipulation of all human social interactions across it's corrupt platform is extremely disturbing and should be investigated and if necessary prosecuted for purposefully causing psychological harm to it's users, duty of care, criminal negligence, fraudulent misrepresentations of the service supplied, in whose interest it was, who benefited and what people lost.

Re: More like Ma Bell

[Zontar The Mindless]

Easy to say for people who seem to think that email and telephones no longer function because OMG FACEBOOK.

Wow

[fahrbot-bot]

Among the financial firms Facebook is said to have argued with about customer data are American Express, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

If Wells Fargo had a problem with it, something's definitely hinky.

We Need a Federal Opt-Out Law

[BrendaEM]

No one signs up for anything by default.

GDPR

[MS]

Welcome Europes privacy law! The rest of the world should follow.

Yup, FB was turned away

[rickb928]

By any ethical banking institution they were certainly told 'NO'.

I work at one of those named institutions, and we would most certainly require that FB comply with federal regulations, banking, credit, and consumer protection law, and our own internal policies and standards. This would all be greatly restricted, if indeed ANY banking information would be permitted to be intercepted or shared at all.

And it would be a surprisingly short conversation. We would have required either a full disclosure of data sharing and use, or more likely an agreement in advance to abide by our policies. Violations would result in our leaving the platform.

I'm not at all surprised FB asked. I would be genuinely astonished if we permitted anything beyond that permitted for any other partner or customer.