Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada, for instance, were granted access to read, write and delete private messages on the Facebook platform.

In other cases, Facebook appears to have granted companies far more access than they needed to build the user-focused features, and relied on trust to ensure the access wasn’t abused. The information, Apple says, never went to its servers, instead simply sitting on the iPhone of the Facebook user, allowing them to check upcoming events without opening the Facebook app. For instance, an integration with Apple allowed iPhone users to link their Facebook calendars with their phone calendars, even if they had changed settings to disable all sharing. Some of the reported loopholes were more or less transparent to the end user, and may even have enabled fairer competition.

In a statement, Facebook said: “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.” The arrangements bypassed Facebook’s typical privacy protections, making it harder for users to determine where and how their data was being shared by using the tools Facebook had made available for that purpose. The New York Times investigation revealed that it had itself been one of the companies granted access to some of the Facebook user data. The loopholes, reported by the New York Times, suggest a company that was prepared to bend its own rules to keep valuable partners onside.įacebook gave Netflix, Spotify and the Royal Bank of Canada the ability to read, write and delete users’ private messages it gave Microsoft, Sony and Amazon the ability to obtain email addresses of their users’ friends as late as 2017 and it gave device manufacturers such as Apple the ability to build special features that plugged into the social network.

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