Yesterday evening, a report offered details on Facebook’s data sharing relationships with over 150 different companies. One of the more jarring allegations related access to messages data. Facebook, however, disputes the details and says it did not disclose people’s private messages to “partners without their knowledge.”
In a post on its Newsroom site today, Facebook explained that it worked with partners to integrate messaging functionalities into their products. This integration allowed people to message their Facebook friends on the other platforms, so long as they used Facebook to log in.
Humorously, Facebook likens this to using Alexa or Apple Mail to read your email:
One such partnership was with Spotify, allowing people to message friends about what they were listening to. A similar feature was available on Netflix. Royal Bank of Canada integration allowed users to receive receipts from money transfers. Facebook adds that integration was available through Dropbox for sharing folders.
The original report from The New York Times outlined Facebook’s relationships with Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada. That report said Facebook’s deals allowed the companies to “read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread,” permissions seemingly not necessary to achieve the functionality Facebook describes.
In its post today, however, Facebook addresses the issue of read/write/delete access to messages:
These partnerships were agreed via extensive negotiations and documentation, detailing how the third party would use the API, and what data they could and couldn’t access.
You can read Facebook’s full response to the allegations here.
