Facebook Releases “The Facts” | Latest User Personal Data Controversy
In Facebook’s latest press release, the company describes messaging data, user privacy and continues to deny allegations that they shared user’s personal data.
Facebook is currently under scrutiny for allegedly sharing users messages over the company’s messaging app, with partnering tech leaders, something that the Facebook team vehemently denied in the media and on their own website.
The Facebook team has been eager to reassure users that their data and privacy is being protected. This past Wednesday, VP of Product Partnerships at Facebook, Ime Archibong, published a press release detailing the “facts” about Facebook’s messaging partnerships.
The Facts
The press release briefly details how Facebook messaging works with the company’s partners and goes on to further discredit any allegations that the company has disclosed people’s private messages.
In the press release, Archibong goes on to describe how integrating messaging into other major apps is “common practice” in the industry and is a feature that can only be used if the user of the Facebook app gives it permission. The core idea for this feature is to simply give people the ability to share other content from separate apps.
As mentioned in the press release “ We worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends — but only if they chose to use Facebook Login”
When users want to even share their messages they give third parties the ability to “write”, “read”, or “delete” access their content. However, it does not mean that third parties can access your messages. Facebook makes it very clear that “no third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission”.
“Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct”, says Facebook. “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.”
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