How Facebook let Big Tech peers inside its privacy wallFacebook let some of the world’s largest technology companies have more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it had previously disclosed. “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends.”Users often didn’t know. “Facebook empowered Apple to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were asking for data. “By 2013, Facebook had entered into more such partnerships than its midlevel employees could easily track, according to interviews with two former employees,” explains the report.

Source: New York Times December 19, 2018 12:14 UTC