Facebook responded late Sunday to a news report that accused the social media giant of giving at least 60 phone and device manufacturers extensive access to users’ personal information.
Fox News reported that Facebook denied any wrongdoing in a statement posted on its website as a response to The New York Times story that showed the existence of data-sharing agreements with numerous companies.
“While we agreed with many of [The New York Times] past concerns about the controls over Facebook information shared with third-party app developers, we disagree with the issues they’ve raised about these APIs,” Ime Archibong, the company’s vice president of product partnerships said.
According to The Times, Facebook had agreements with Apple, Blackberry, Microsoft, and Samsung to provide them access to users’ data.
“This was flagged internally as a privacy issue,” Sandy Parakilas, a former leader of the platform’s privacy compliance unit, said. “It is shocking that this practice may still continue six years later, and it appears to contradict Facebook’s testimony to Congress that all friend permissions were disabled.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Apple told the Times they used their agreement with Facebook to allow iPhone users to post photos to the platform without the need to open the Facebook app. However, Apple no longer has that access to Facebook since last September.
A Blackberry spokesman stated that the company “did not collect or mine” the data given by Facebook, while a Microsoft representative said that the company started working with Facebook in 2008, adding that no data was synced with Microsoft servers because it was stored locally on the phones powered by Microsoft.
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