Your Private Facebook Messages May Have Been Given to Other Companies
I'm sure you remember earlier this year when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened on Facebook. Now The New York Times is reporting that your private messages could have been given to Netflix and Spotify.
The New York Times got ahold of "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents" that talked about "special arrangements" between Facebook and "some of the world's largest tech companies." These special arrangements give the tech companies "more intrusive access to users’ personal data than [Facebook] has disclosed."
After going through these documents and interviewing about 50 former Facebook employees, The New York Times believes that Netflix and Spotify have been given access to some of your private Facebook messages.
Facebook says that the messages weren't shared without your consent though.
In a statement on their site, Facebook says,
Our integration partners had to get authorization from people. You would have had to sign in with your Facebook account to use the integration offered by Apple, Amazon or another integration partner.
So if you have your Facebook account linked to another account (like Spotify) that was enough consent for Facebook to then allow Spotify access to your personal messages.
Maybe we should be reading the fine print more? Or maybe companies shouldn't be able to access private information like that, period.
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