Facebook opens access to user data to 60 smartphone manufacturers

Facebook over the past 10 years has provided access to personal user data for at least 60 gadget manufacturers, including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft and BlackBerry, writes The New York Times. Most of these agreements are still in place, although the Cambrigde Analytica scandal has begun to back them off.

Details

• Contracts with manufacturers allowed Facebook to expand its influence early in its development, as manufacturers were able to offer customers popular features of the social network, such as the Like button and the messenger.
• According to the publication, some manufacturers get access not only to the information of the user himself, but also to the data of his friends, who did not consent to the collection of their personal data. In particular, companies can receive information about the religious and political views, marital status of users and events that interest them.
• NYT emphasizes that, according to the official position of Facebook, the social network has banned third-party applications from collecting information about users' friends since 2015, but the company did not specify - the restrictions did not affect the creators of smartphones and other gadgets.
• “You might think that Facebook or the manufacturers are trustworthy. But the problem is that if applications can access device data, this creates serious security problems - because more and more data is stored on smartphones, ”said Serge Egelman, a mobile application security researcher at the University of California, California.
• Many of these agreements are still in place, Facebook began to pull them out in April amid the Cambrigde Analytica scandal, the newspaper writes.
• Facebook said that all of these agreements comply with the company's rules and the requirements of the US Federal Trade Commission. Representatives of the company also emphasized that for the entire period of the agreements, not a single case of misuse of data was recorded.

Context

Facebook has only recently (financially at least) recovered from a scandal involving the data breach of 87 million Facebook users to Cambrigde Analytica, which later partnered with Donald Trump's political strategists during the 2016 US election campaign.

• After the scandal, Facebook announced the strengthening of the privacy regime on the social network, and Mark Zuckerberg had to speak to American and European parliamentarians.
• You can read more about the leak itself here ; about the person who created the test application, because of which the leak itself occurred - a teacher at Cambridge and St. Petersburg University, a native of Moldova, Alexander Kogan, we wrote in detail here .
• In addition, you can read the material Wired, which describes how the company was managed in the last two years.

Artem Gubenko