Facebook Allowed Netflix, Spotify To Access Users Private Messages

Harin - Dec 20, 2018

Facebook has admitted that it allowed other tech firms, specifically Spotify and Netflix, to access users’ private messages.

In response to a report from The New York Times stating the social media giant offered its user data to its partners in many years, Facebook said that companies have been given extensive access to its users’ message.

According to the company, this happened so that people could use their Facebook account to log into other services like Spotify and send messages via the Spotify app.

In its blog post, Facebook wrote:

Quoting from Facebook’s internal documents, The New York Times said that Spotify could read the messages of over 70 million users of Facebook each month. The Times further mentioned that reading, writing and deleting people’s chats are possible for the Royal Bank of Canada, Netflix, and Spotify.

However, both companies, Netflix and Spotify told The Times that they were unaware of this kind of access. Facebook stated that there didn’t find any evidence of abuse. In a conversation with The Business Insider, Netflix said that the company didn’t access any user’s messages.

A spokeswoman from Netflix said that:

As pointed out by Facebook’s former privacy chief, Alex Stamos, the fact that Facebook has deep integrations with its third-party partners is not surprising. This partnership can give an indication to an interoperable and healthy ecosystem.

On Wednesday, Stamos posted a tweet on his Twitter account, which reads:

The most concerned issue is the fact that the platform offered users’ data to third parties without their consent. Many of them have a tendency to assume that their messages on social media platforms will always stay private.

Formal officials from the Federal Trade Commission told The New York Times that Facebook’s agreements on data sharing in all likelihood violated the regulatory requirements.

For the social media giant, this is the latest in a series of its privacy scandals. The company is still grappling with the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened in March and other regulatory fines. Multiple breaches of Facebook has been disclosed in the last few months which includes a 50-million-user hack in September.