Facebook Gave More Than 150 Companies, Including Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and Yahoo, Unprecedented Access To Users' Personal Data: NYT

The New York Times obtained hundreds of pages of Facebook documents which were generated in 2017 that show that the social network considered these companies business partners and effectively exempted them from its privacy rules. From a report: Facebook allowed Microsoft's search engine Bing to see the names of nearly all users' friends without their consent, let Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada read, write, and delete users' private messages, and see participants on a thread, allowed Amazon to get users' names and contact information through their friends, and let Yahoo view streams of friends' posts 'as recently as this summer' despite publicly claiming it had stopped sharing such information a year ago, the report said. Collectively, applications made by these technology companies sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month.

The records also show that Russian search giant Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraine's security service for giving user data to Kremlin, also had access to Facebook's unique user IDs in 2017. A Yandex spokeswoman told the Times that the company was unaware of the access to user data provided by Facebook. Yandex did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment. In response to the report, Steve Satterfield, Facebook's Director of Privacy and Public Policy defended the actions of the social network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.