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?