Facebook says preferential data access was with user permission

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc (FB.O) said it did not give some companies access to people’s data without their permission, after the New York Times reported on Tuesday that the social network allowed some large technology companies greater access to user data.

The paper reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without their consent, citing documents from 2017.

“None of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC,” Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, said in a blog post bit.ly/2GrSQ6f.

Facebook also gave companies like Netflix (NFLX.O) and Spotify (SPOT.N) the ability to read users’ private messages and permitted Amazon (AMZN.O) to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, the New York Times said.

Facebook said what it did was to help users access their Facebook accounts or specific features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple (AAPL.O), Amazon, Blackberry (BB.TO) and Yahoo, known as integration partners.

The company said these partners got access to messages but users “had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first” before using a partner’s messaging feature.

Facebook said it shut down nearly all of these partnerships over the past several months, except Apple and Amazon.

Earlier this month, a British lawmaker released documents that revealed Facebook offered some companies, including Netflix (NFLX.O) and Airbnb, access to data about users’ friends it did not make available to most other apps in 2015.