Facebook says user preferential data access to third-party apps given with user permission
Facebook also gave companies like Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ private messages and permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends
Facebook said it did not give some companies access to people's data without their permission, after the New York Times reported on Tuesday that the social network allowed some large technology companies greater access to user data.
The paper reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without their consent, citing documents from 2017.
"None of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's director of developer platforms and programs, said in a blog post.
Facebook also gave companies like Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users' private messages and permitted Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, the New York Times said.
Facebook said what it did was to help users access their Facebook accounts or specific features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple, Amazon, Blackberry and Yahoo, known as integration partners. Read: I have no plan to step down, says Zuckerberg
The company said these partners got access to messages but users "had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first" before using a partner's messaging feature.
READ: Apple did not request any personal data from Facebook: Tim Cook
Facebook said it shut down nearly all of these partnerships over the past several months, except Apple and Amazon.
Earlier this month, a British lawmaker released documents that revealed Facebook offered some companies, including Netflix and Airbnb, access to data about users' friends it did not make available to most other apps in 2015.
Catch all the Latest Tech News, Mobile News, Laptop News, Gaming news, Wearables News , How To News, also keep up with us on Whatsapp channel,Twitter, Facebook, Google News, and Instagram. For our latest videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.