More Lies from Facebook — Users’ Private Data Disclosed to Other Companies

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore, for The New York Times:

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews […]

Facebook 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 social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for other tech companies, which I’m sure they’ll completely ignore. Lying to users and toying with the privacy should not be taken lightly and I keep on wondering when most will realise they don’t need Facebook anymore.