Here's facebooks response as to why the android app requires what it does. https://www.facebook.com/help/210676372433246
I think this article is sensationalist garbage with no proof of facebook mistreating user data.
I think this article is sensationalist garbage with no proof of facebook mistreating user data.
> Read your text messages (SMS or MMS) - If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message.
I don't mind doing this manually.
> Download files without notification - This allows us to improve the app experience by pre-loading News Feed content.
Happy to wait until I want to load the content.
> Read/write your contacts - These permissions allow you to import your phone’s contacts to Facebook and sync your Facebook contacts to your phone.
Not interested in having my niece's dog's vet's window cleaner in my phone's contacts.
> Add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners’ knowledge - This allows you to see your Facebook events in your phone’s calendar.
Might be interested in having this if they got it right, at the moment I get every event I'm invited to added to my calendar, even those I'm not interested in.
> Read calendar events plus confidential information - This allows the app to show your calendar availability (based on your phone’s calendar) when you’re viewing an event on Facebook.
Again, something I'm not really all that interested in.
I don't understand why I need any of these features in order to perform the most common use case - browsing my timeline and posting the occasional update. I'm not advocating removing these features entirely because there are plenty of people who make use of them, but they should be optional - either made optional through changes to Android's permissions system or by FB themselves.
Will I agree that the article is sensationalizing, but if history is any indication, Facebook can & will use all this data against your wishes.
I've had the official facebook application installed for months and they never read the SMS messages.
Facebook is limited to what its privacy policy and TOU allow. If Facebook goes beyond that, the FTC, state attorneys general, and a bevy of bottom-feeding class action lawyers will sue (and win).
Anyone who doesn't understand this -- this is directed at the author of the blog post that started this thread, not the parent post -- has no business writing about privacy.
That's an utopian interpretation of how corporations work. Most of them have a motto : "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission"
Proof : A lot of genuine lawsuits...
Not quite. The "genuine lawsuits you mention are proof only that (a) bottom-feeding lawyers file meritless lawsuits in hopes of a fat $$$ settlement, or (b) that sometimes even well-intentioned companies make mistakes and do things beyond what their privacy policy and TOU permit.
It's also possible it's used for other things said engineer doesn't know about via scope creep or as another channel of PRISM et al, in which case those people will be thanking the engineer who added the feature.