Shameless Facebook Continues Giving User Data To Third-Party Developers

  • AUTHOR: dua
  • POSTED ON: July 2, 2020

Remember when Facebook promised that it won’t be giving user data to third parties? Well, it’s going back on its promise yet again.


On Wednesday, Facebook announced that thousands of third parties received updates about user’s nonpublic information. Furthermore, an unspecified number of users failed to cut off data spigot.


An attempt was made to reach out to Facebook to find out the exact number, but there was no immediate response. The post by Facebook doesn’t exactly give insight into the privacy mishap but it was suggested that the user info included the email address, birthdays, gender, etc.


"[Recently], we discovered that in some instances apps continued to receive the data that people had previously authorized, even if it appeared they hadn’t used the app in the last 90 days. For example, this could happen if someone used a fitness app to invite their friends from their hometown to a workout, but we didn’t recognize that some of their friends had been inactive for many months.” – Wrote Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's vice president.


This isn’t the first time when user info has been given to third parties. Similar incidents occurred in late 2019. At the time Papamiltiadis said:"[We] recently found that some apps retained access to group member information, like names and profile pictures in connection with group activity, from the Groups API, for longer than we intended. We know at least 11 partners accessed group members' information in the last 60 days."


Back in 2018, he was also asked to clarify why this information is passed on to third parties. At the time, he had assured the users that the company was trying its best to stop it.


"We’ve taken a number of steps this year to limit developers' access to people's Facebook information, and as part of that ongoing effort, we're in the midst of reviewing all our APIs and the partners who can access them." – He wrote.


Time and again Facebook has disappointed us and broken our trust. How long can we allow them to invade our privacy? 


Updated July 2, 2020
Back To Top