The social network took out full-page apology ads in several major US and UK Sunday newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. In each case, the ad included a letter from Mark Zuckerberg, who said he was “sorry” Facebook didn’t “do more” when it learned that Cambridge Analytica had harvested data on more than 50 million people without their permission.
… The apology also reiterated that Facebook had already changed its data collection rules, and that it was looking into “every single app” that had access to large data sets. If it finds other offenders, it will “ban them and tell everyone affected.”
FACEBOOK HAS BEEN COLLECTING CALL HISTORY!
Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some.
… Facebook has been requesting access to contacts, SMS data, and call history on Android devices to improve its friend recommendation algorithm and distinguish between business contacts and your true personal friendships. Facebook appears to be gathering this data through its Messenger application, which often prompts Android users to take over as the default SMS client. Facebook has, at least recently, been offering an opt-in prompt that prods users with a big blue button to “continuously upload” contact data, including call and text history. It’s not clear when this prompt started appearing in relation to the historical data gathering, and whether it has simply been opt-in the whole time. Either way, it’s clearly alarmed some who have found call history data stored on Facebook’s servers.