Facebook let Netflix & Spotify read users' private messages: Reports

Facebook allowed companies like Netflix and Spotify to access users' private messages, the NYTimes reported.

Facebook allowed Netflix and Spotify to read the private messages of its users.The New York Times has published a blockbuster report documenting privacy abuses at the world’s largest social media platform, Facebook. The newspaper documents that Facebook shared private information about its users with so-called “partners” (companies that had come into business agreements with Facebook). Because of these partnership agreements, Facebook felt it didn’t need to notify either its users or government regulators at the Federal Trade Commission (F.T.C.).

“The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages,” the Times notes.“Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show.”

Aside from Spotify, Bing, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada, other “partners” that Facebook shared information with include Yahoo, Amazon, the Russian search engine Yandex, and the Chinese firm Huawei. Both Yandex and Huawei are known to work with the security services of their home countries.

Huawei has been named as a security threat by the American government.