We’ve known them intimately since 2004 but it’s getting really hard to trust our old frenemies at Facebook.
Robot CEO Mark Zuckerberg has had another programming slip-up, letting your personal details slide once again – this time giving Spotify and Netflix access to your private messages.
Facebook has hit another wall in public trust by allowing Netflix and Spotify to access users’ private messages without their consent, The New York Times reports.
The New York Times (NYT) revealed this violation via hundreds of pages of documents taken from the social media company’s internal system for tracking partnerships in 2017.
“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”
“The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.”
Your data is an asset that can now be leveraged. In return for this data, Facebook gets more users and a greater advertising capacity.
This report has upped the ante again for the #DeleteFacebook movement, a number of stakeholders are asking Zucc to resign as Chairman, and the company’s stocks have taken a dive.
Steve Satterfield, the director of privacy and public policy for Facebook, told the NYT in an interview, “We know we’ve got work to do to regain people’s trust. Protecting people’s information requires stronger teams, better technology and clearer policies, and that’s where we’ve been focused for most of 2018.”
Satterfield considers the social network’s partners an extension of themselves – and that’s the excuse for sharing users’ info without their consent.
Spotify and Netflix put out statements which claimed they were not knowledgable about the powers they were given by Facebook.
Netflix in the US jokingly tweeted, “Netflix never asked for, or accessed, anyone’s private messages. We’re not the type to slide into your DMs.”
Via Pitchfork.
