Facebook scraped call, text information for a long time from Android os phones

This previous week, a brand new Zealand guy ended up being searching through information Facebook had gathered I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 2015 and 2016, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.( from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us—my own Facebook data archive,*************)

In reaction to a contact inquiry relating to this information gathering by Ars, a Facebook representative responded, “The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts.”

The representative remarked that contact uploading is optional and installing the application form clearly requests authorization to gain access to connections. And users can delete contact information from their pages making use of something available via Web web browser.

Facebook makes use of phone-contact information included in its recommendation that is friend algorithm. And in recent versions of the Messenger application for Android and Facebook Lite devices, a more request that is explicit designed to users for use of phone logs and SMS logs on Android os and Facebook Lite products. But even though users did not provide that authorization to Messenger, they could inadvertently have given it for years through Facebook’s mobile apps—because of the way Android has handled permissions for accessing call logs in the past.

If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook’s installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this noticeable modification when they had been written to previous versions regarding the API, therefore Facebook API could continue steadily to get access to phone and SMS information by indicating a youthful Android os SDK variation. Google deprecated variation 4.0 regarding the Android os API in October 2017—the point of which the newest call metadata in Facebook individual’s information ended up being discovered. Apple iOS hasn’t permitted access that is silent call data

Facebook provides a way for users to purge collected contact data from their accounts, but it’s not clear if this deletes just contacts or if it also purges call and SMS metadata. This may be because the archive was still the same cache I had requested on Friday.( after purging my contact data, my contacts and calls were still in the archive I downloaded the next day—though*************)

As constantly, if you are actually worried about privacy, you shouldn’t share target guide and call-log information with any application that is mobile. And you will desire to examine the remainder of so what can be located within the online Facebook archive, because it includes all advertisers that Facebook has provided your contact information with, among other items.