How Facebook allowed device manufacturers to access their users' data

How Facebook allowed device manufacturers to access their users' data

The New York Times recently revealed that the agreements that Facebook has with device manufacturers allowed the latter to access data from users of the social network during the past decade.

That is, companies such as Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry or Amazon obtained information from those who use Facebook without this being clarified to the users of the network, due to agreements agreed before the mobile application of Facebook existed or that this It was widely used. For example, when using an application such as the BlackBerry Hub to connect to Facebook, the BlackBerry could extract information such as the civil status or religion reported by that user, as well as their virtual friends. Apple told Times reporters that one of the uses of these accesses was so that users could post images taken from their cell phones without connecting to the Facebook application, but that the agreements are not valid since September of last year.


While the debate about Facebook's privacy practices continues , this is what we know about the company's association with manufacturers of cell phones, tablets, game consoles and other devices:

Why would Facebook give them access to user data?
Facebook executives said that the company began to establish partnerships with the companies that manufacture the devices in 2007. The social network wanted to make sure that their services were available to Facebook users not only on desktop computers, but where people would use them. the internet: mobile phones, smart TVs, video game consoles and other products.

At that time, many cell phones could not run Facebook applications. That's why Facebook allowed manufacturers to integrate elements of the social network - like I like buttons, a function to share photos or friends' lists - into their devices.

Is it just the Facebook application for mobile?
No. Facebook has said that its device partners used private data access for both the Facebook application and for other applications and integrations that it considers part of the " Facebook experience ." This varies according to the company with which the devices are made. Some have applications that display Facebook messages in a social "hub" along with other messages. Others integrate Facebook status updates and friends information on the device's news channel. In some cases, the device extracts data from Facebook and includes it in its own contact list:


What does that have to do with Cambridge Analytica?
In 2014, the Cambridge Analytica policy consulting firm sought to generate psychological profiles of US voters using Facebook data, such as the types of content that people liked . Only a few hundred thousand people gave the Cambridge Analytica contractor access to their Facebook information, many of them through a third-party questionnaire application.

However, based on Facebook policies at the time, the application could extract data from all Facebook friends of those people; In total they would have obtained information from 87 million people , according to the social network. The contractor sold the data to Cambridge Analytica to generate technology for voter profiles, something that Facebook claims was a misuse of the data. The company worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Facebook has said in recent months that an abuse like Cambridge Analytica could not have happened after 2015, when the web company imposed restrictions so that users could choose what data their Facebook friends could share with third parties.

However, The New York Times' recent report shows that Facebook continued to allow that kind of access to dozens of the world's largest technology and hardware companies, and that it only began to invalidate data sharing associations after it The Cambridge Analytica scandal came out in March.

How do I prevent my information from ending up in the hands of device manufacturers?
Unless at all times you closely follow the devices that all your Facebook friends use, you will not know which manufacturers have access to your data. You could adjust your settings to block all external applications so they do not extract your data, but some device manufacturers, including BlackBerry, can bypass that restriction. Unless you delete your account , the only thing you can do to make sure that your data is not shared with device manufacturers is to set everything in your configuration to be private, although this will also prevent your friends from seeing the information.

Have the device manufacturers then gathered huge data collections from Facebook?
Facebook has said that some of its device manufacturing partners store the data of Facebook users, and their friends, on their own servers. However, Facebook has also said that, no matter where the information is stored, its partners signed strict contracts regarding the use of that data. That does not necessarily mean that the data is safe. One of the lessons of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is how difficult it is to control what happens with users' data once they leave the Facebook system.

Facebook also said that it periodically audits the use that its partners give to the data. Some partners store Facebook data on their own servers, while others have said that the data is sent directly to each device. But both Facebook and some of these partners who were contacted by The New York Times recognize that there are several ways in which Facebook information could be obtained from these devices, including when a device supports its own data in cloud services or synchronize with third-party applications.

A third-party application is any application that was not created by the device's manufacturer, such as messaging and banking. Every time a game or some other recently downloaded application asks you for access to your contact list, that information could be shared.