Facebook spies on phone users' text messages, report says

That's exactly what I thought.

Especially, too, since you cannot do this on iOS with public API's (and I assume even with private, but I could be wrong). Even if you did find a loophole, Apple wouldn't allow it, and they'd close it.

And even on Android, don't you have to enable an app's access to your SMS messages?

This article had no details. It was way too short for the accusations made.

What we need to see is proof that somehow the contents of the text message is sent back to facebook.

There are tools like mitmproxy to see the traffic. Couldn't someone with a facebook account using the app explicitly check whether or not the contents of the messages are relayed back?

Exactly, This reminds me of the whole Tesla battery bricking saga. The News outlets love nothing more than to find some technology company that is doing something "wrong" (even if they are not) and hang them out to dry without doing ANY fact checking. It seems many news organizations have stooped to the level of celebrity gossip magazines.

I want to see proof of texts being sent back to Facebook or it did not happen.

Although bogus, maybe this story has some benefit then. Perhaps app developers will stop asking for the kitchen sink, so permissions are remotely useful again.

There is an Android permission that an application can request and a user can grant which allows applications to read SMS.

This is true [1], but part of that is because Android allows you to use whatever text messaging app you want rather than forcing you to use the one provided. And of course, this is a permission that you have to agree to [2].

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserE...

[2]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

I don't see anything scary. Nobody forces you to use Facebook (I very very seldom use it).

Most of its users don't care about their own privacy, so why should Facebook care about it's users privacy?