Whenever you install Facebook Messenger on your Android phone, it requests you for access to contacts, SMS data, and call records to improve its friend recommendation algorithm and distinguish between business contacts and your true personal friendships. Facebook appears to be gathering this data, which often prompts Android users to take over as the default SMS client.
These anomalies where discovered by Facebook users who were recently 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 worrying for some.
Its a known fact that Facebook has recently, been offering an opt-in prompt that asks 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.
According to a report by Ars Technica, the troubling aspect that Facebook has been doing this for years, during a time when Android permissions were a lot less strict. Google changed Android permissions to make them more clear and detailed, but developers could bypass this and continue accessing call and SMS data until Google deprecated the old Android API in October. It’s not yet clear if these prompts have been in place in the past.
Facebook responds
Facebook has responded to the findings, but the company appears to suggest it’s normal for apps to access your phone call history when you upload contacts to social apps.
“The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts.”
So far, the issue doesn’t seem to affect iPhone users as the majority of iOS apps cannot access call history or SMS messages, and Facebook’s iOS app is not able to capture this data on an iPhone.
Facebook may need to answer some additional questions on this data collection, especially around when it started and whether Android users truly understood what data they were allowing Facebook to collect when they agreed to enable phone and SMS access in an Android permissions dialogue box or Facebook’s own prompt.
