Test Shows Facebook Begins Collecting Data From Several Popular Apps Seconds After Users Start Consuming Them. Company Also Collects Data of Non-Facebook Users. (wsj.com)

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.] The Wall Street Journal reports: The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed. [...] In the case of apps, the Journal's testing showed that Facebook software collects data from many apps even if no Facebook account is used to log in and if the end user isn't a Facebook member.

In the Journal's testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple's iOS, made by California-based Azumio, sent a user's heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded. Flo Health's Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed. Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move, a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed. None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook. Update: New York Governor Cuomo has ordered probe into Facebook access to personal data.

Comments

Re:Nice paywall

[Oswald McWeany]

Anyone got the list of apps to avoid?

Yes... all of them. Always assume everything you post to an app CAN, and PROBABLY will find it's way into the wrong hands eventually.

Just shut em down ...

[Rip!ey]

Just shut em down for fucks sake. They don't care, at all. Not one little bit.The entire concept of social contract escapes them.

I don't do social media. Not at all. And yet I can't escape them.

Re:Just shut em down ...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Do you know how many websites now REQUIRE Facebook logins?

None, so far as I'm aware, that you're required to patronize. If you don't like the tie in with FB, don't give these sites your business. They will either change their policies or wither and die.

Why is it people are so oblivious to the power they have to affect change without requiring The Almighty Hand Of Government to step in and regulate everything? Is it just lazy thinking?

Re:You can't stop them. Everything is collected

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure Facebook is a US intelligence front company.

Stop calling it "sharing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop using the feel-good propaganda word "sharing" to describe the practice of stalking, spying, profiling, and selling personal data.

Re:Stop calling it "sharing"

[smooth wombat]

Please stop using the feel-good propaganda word "sharing" to describe the practice of stalking, spying, profiling, and selling personal data.

It's no different than when people claim they're "sharing" music and videos.

If you're not going to pay the producers for the items you're using, why should these companies not be able to use your data for free?

Re:Cool Study

[OneHundredAndTen]

Everybody did most certainly not know that apps that are not obviously affiliated with FB send users' personal data to FB, regardless whether or not you are a FB user.