Facebook Had Data Deal With Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Others

Gabriel Dance, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Laforgia, for The New York Times:

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books […]

An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.

The article makes it sound as if Apple pulled or had access to private user data from Facebook.