Facebook Shares Tank After Report on Data Access to Tech Giants

The social networking giant has responded to the allegations in which it said that none of the data was misused.

Facebook has a new breach to answer for.

(Photo: AP)

After a New York Times expose suggested that Facebook shared users’ personal information with other tech giants, the company’s shares on Wednesday, 19 December, fell 7.25 percent, its biggest intra-day drop since July. This takes the losses for this year to about 24 percent.

More revelations about Facebook’s data protection regulations said that companies like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon were given access to user information, according to The New York Times. The report points out that Facebook gave data access to third-parties without user consent for many years. The social media network reportedly gave access to users’ personal information, and also the details of those on friend lists, the report added.

To make matters worse, NYT confirmed that Netflix and Spotify were able to read and even delete a user’s private messages on Facebook.

Netflix has denied accessing the private messages of users on Facebook.

“Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social. One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so.”

Netflix, in a statement

This is not the first big incident to come out in public this year, but having names like Apple and Amazon added to the list of beneficiaries does raise concerns about everything that Facebook has done since its launch more than a decade ago.

The revelations are staggering enough to put it right above the Cambridge Analytica episode which shocked the global internet fraternity.

Facebook claims that information access was given to other platforms, only when the users signed in with his/her Facebook login on those platforms. This unique way of logging in to other applications has always been discouraged, and those who didn’t take heed, are probably the ones ruing their actions.

With Apple, the report says, Facebook had a unique partnership, allowing access to a user’s Facebook contacts and entries, even if they had disabled it manually. Apple, responding to the publication said that any data of that magnitude will never leave the device.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine was able to go through a user’s feed and get information on his/her friends, which the Windows maker claims have all been deleted.

But the worst of the lot has to be Amazon, which also got hold of user information and names and indirectly seemed to confirm that the data was used for appropriate reasons, without disclosing the actual use of it.

And it gets even murkier, with The New York Times claimed that popular streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify got access to user messages without their consent, offering them to read and even write messages.

This was possible, after Facebook, via its Messenger allowed apps like Spotify to help users send music suggestions through the platform, which later got misused by tweaking the APIs to make it a privacy hazard.

Just a few days back, Facebook apologised for another leak, which lead to access of photos of over 7 million Facebook users to developers.

And now, you have another sensational report which puts the social networking giant and its much maligned CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in further trouble. It can’t be a co-incidence that all these developments are coming out in the same year.

With over 100 million users on Netflix, and 70 million on Spotify, nobody knows to what extent the damage has been caused. Add to that you have over 150 companies claimed in the report, to be benefiting from lapses at Facebook’s end, but could soon come under the spotlight of the US Congress.

All this while, we’ve been thinking that Facebook has been selling user data to make money. Turns out, they might have just freely handed over the data to anybody who was willing to deal with the company.

(With inputs from The New York Times and Reuters.)