Facebook continues to speak, having been involved in the scandal of a data analysis company Cambridge Analytica, the company is now again being accused of sharing data with other companies.
Yes, the problem about data privacy practices of the social network continues. This time the New York Times reported that Facebook apparently shared an inadequate amount of user information with device makers such as Apple, Samsung, and Amazon.
What really happened?
According to our source, social networking agreements with hardware manufacturers predate the existence of the Facebook application. The company created APIs that would allow companies like Apple or Blackberry to create features similar to the social networking application. To enable these features to work, the company agreed to share user data with companies.
As an example, the writer Michael LaForgia has logged into your Facebook account on a Blackberry Z10. The Phone Hub application has retrieved religious, relationship, and policy information from all your 556 friends and 294.258 from your friends' friends.
Facebook responded to the article directly in a press release. In him, Ime Archibong, vice president of product partnerships for the company, argues that the two situations are completely different:
Because these APIs allowed other companies to recreate the Facebook experience, we controlled them rigorously from the outset. These partners signed contracts that prevented people's Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than re-creating experiences similar to the social network. This is very different from the public APIs used by third-party developers.
Archibong said that APIs were created to fill a social network demand in the mobile application that the company could not meet alone and therefore necessary. He also noted that the company is decreasing these partnerships in general, having already closed 22 of them.
