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What with the social network getting in trouble after trouble for collecting user data from users, it shouldn’t be surprising at this point to find out that Facebook has been doing the same thing with SMS and call data. It seems to be doing this only to Android devices, however, leaving iOS users out of the data mining scandal.
This new development comes courtesy of several users on Twitter downloading their Facebook data and finding out that the social network has been collecting information such as their calls to their phones’ contacts. One such user was Dylan McKay who posted a screenshot of the data via Tweet.
“Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file,” the Tweet reads. “Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum.”
Naturally, this has disturbing implications since it’s more than likely that not too many users agreed or even expected to have this particular set of information collected and then saved by Facebook. When Ars Technica looked into it, several users of the social network confirmed similar experiences.
The staff at the publication also did some digging regarding their own profiles and this development is undeniably prolific. When asked about this particular activity, a spokesperson for Facebook simply said that uploading contact information from a new user’s device allowed the social network to recommend friends.
"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," the spokesperson said.
As The Verge notes, the only devices to have been affected so far appear to be those running on Android. It would seem that this is due to how the security protocols on iOS hindered apps from access SMS and call information on Apple’s devices. The same could not be said about older versions of Android.
