Facebook made it easier for Microsoft and other large companies to access private user data without their consent

2018 will not be a year that Facebook remembers fondly. And it is that the scandals referring to the famous social network have not stopped happening. We saw it with the _affaire_ Cambridge Analytica, later with the use of users' phones for advertising purposes or photos shared by third parties with the particularity that they had not been published. And now another new problem affects the company led by Mark Zuckerberg

Apparently Mark Zuckerberg's company allowed different companies such as Microsoft, The Times, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix… the access to their users' private informationsuch as private messages or contacts.The platform made it possible to obtain data from its users, and of course, without their having any knowledge.

They have told it in a report by the prestigious New York Times newspaper in which they affirm that the unlimited personal data of the users of the platform were exposed, information to which more than 150 companies had access.

The premise that states that when a product is free it is because in reality, we are the product, acquires a tremendous dimension in this case. And it is that to arrive at the information provided by the New York Times, internal Facebook documents have been studied and dozens of interviews have been carried out with company workers. All these investigations have served to show that Facebook has an appetite for our data and apparently also for trading with it.

In the case of Microsoft, which is the one that affects us, Facebook allowed the Bing search engine owned by those from Redmond,access the names of all friends on the social network But if this is important, perhaps it is even more so on Netflix and Spotify, where Facebook allowed access to the private messages from users of its platform (Spotify could see messages from more than 70 million users per month).

Amazon, another big man, had access to names and contact information through friends. While The Times, one of the nine companies within the media, had access to the friends lists of users for an application designed to share articles. And let's remember, there are only five examples out of a total of 150 beneficiary companies.

Our privacy is in serious danger

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Apparently this situation dates back to 2017 and since then some of these agreements are still in force, contradicting Facebook&39;s promise to protect user data. The more than 270 pages of reports studied detail this."

These data add to another scandal that has already been revealed and that once again put Facebook against the wall by revealing agreements with more than 60 manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, and other devices, allowing them to access to private information. To cite the most well-known company, in the case of Apple, Facebook allowed Apple devices to have access to contact numbers and calendar entries and that despite the fact that the user had established that these data were not shared

Facebook has not taken long to react to this situation and defends itself by arguing that these agreements do not violate the FTC regulations of 2012 and that none of the private information of the users was shared with companies without the knowledge of the same.

Via | Fossybites Font | New York Times