2018 will certainly go down as the worst year in Facebook’s history as the company has been hit with another data scandal.
This relates to a New York Times investigation that revealed the social network gave 150 companies access to hundreds of millions of user data without their consent.
The investigation demonstrated that Facebook struck deals with different partners, including Amazon, Spotify and Netflix, to give them access to user data. The partnerships allowed these companies to read, write and delete Facebook users’ private messages, as well as to see all the participants in a message thread.
As well, it also allowed companies to see users’ email address and phone numbers.
It’s highly unlikely that these companies will have been deleting or even reading your individual messages. According to TechCrunch, usually, this kind of access would allow people to send their friends Spotify songs or Netflix film recommendations in a Facebook message without having to leave those apps.
A lot of the time, when people sign up to a platform using their Facebook account, there will have been an option in settings to accept or reject data access in this way. However, the issue the NYT investigation has shown is that many of the partners’ applications wouldn’t appear in a Facebook’s user settings, so if an individual had disabled all sharing in this manner, the companies still had access to their information.
The big issue appears to be with Facebook’s ‘People You May Know’ feature. The investigation says Facebook used data from Amazon, Yahoo and Huawei to improve its friends’ suggestions. Whilst Facebook wasn't making any direct money from these partnerships, features such as this attracted new users to the social network, which drove up the platform’s advertising revenue.
Once again, Facebook’s mantra of move fast, break things has caused it to get into some serious trouble. Just last week, the company revealed that it accidentally exposed 6.8 million users’ photos to third-party apps that weren’t supposed to have them. This included photos they had posted privately or ones that hadn’t finished uploading yet.
This is having an impact on its user numbers. A recent study by the Pew Research Centre in the US showed that 42 per cent of Facebook users aged 18 and over were taking a break from the social network “for several weeks or more.” Around 25 per cent of respondents said they had deleted the app entirely from their smartphones.
In a blog post by Facebook, the company admits it gave large tech companies access to people's information but says it was never done without people's permission and that it wound down a lot of these partnerships earlier this year following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company also points out that there is no evidence to suggest that any of this data was misused.
However, in a year of extremely bad news for the company, it needs to do a lot to rebuild trust with the people still using the platform.
