It was unclear to users what they consented to when they signed in. Because Facebook doesn't give a damn about proper consent. The fact that Facebook botched it up is not less problematic than Facebook selling data because the outcome for users is more or less the same.

Turns out "move fast and break things" is a shitty policy when it comes to privacy concerns.

>The fact that Facebook botched it up is not less problematic than Facebook selling data because the outcome for users is more or less the same.

Users signed in to services they already had accounts with, and therefore trusted, knowing they were enabling features they wanted to use with their data. These services were hand selected big name companies. This is a far cry from selling data to the highest bidder for profit.

>It was unclear to users what they consented to when they signed in.

I highly doubt anyone would consent to allowing third party companies to read their private messages if that was actually made clear to them.

I think this might be part of the problem. The idea of handing over your private messages to some random company is so absurd that the average person probably assumes that it couldn’t possibly be what they’re asking for. You’ll have to make the permission prompt really explicit to overcome that.

Plenty of people installed Facebook apps that required permission to read all text messages

Yes, but that doesn't mean that they consent to Facebook using that data. Whatsapp for example asks "read SMS" permission to verify your phone number. It also requires access to your contact list or else everyone's name will be shown as a phone number.

The average user seems to assume that the information is used to provide the service and nothing more. The last person I asked if they were worried about how much information FB has about them replied something among the lines of "Yes, but it's only things that I deliberately chose to share." (paraphrased)

Sounds like we need another Facebook apology tour.

This strongly reminds me of that South Park episode which had the BP Oil CEO apologizing for fucking up. Over and over again.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WTsDqIcpHUc

"We're sorry you misunderstood how we operate." - Zuckerberg

When I use a Google or Facebook account to sign into other services I do not expect private messages to be exposed. My likes, pages I follow and other relevant stuff would be expected. I do not expect a company to share my information to a 3rd party just because one of my friend consented.[1]

Congress needs to lay the hammer down and come up with privacy rights akin to GDRP.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...

It wasn't about signing up to the accounts using FB though (as far as I understand it). These were services that acted as clients for the private messaging so they could send media directly to your friends via FB messages. I could see the granularity being too low (maybe they should have only had access to messages created in that 3rd party service), but I don't think it was necessarily nefarious that they had blanket access to all private messages, that was just the most straight forward way to implement it during a time period when people were way more excited about open APIs then they were about strict privacy.

To me, it isn't really clear what it is about.

Facebook said:

> Did partners get access to messages?

Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature.

Spotify pushed "log in with Facebook" and as far as I know, for a while it was the only way to use Spotify, and I would have expected Facebook to word the above stronger if they had additional steps to give access to messages. Do you know additional details? (really wish both sides here would present detailed flows)

Good for asking for more details, it seems like most people have already made up their minds without asking for any details, just fill in the blanks to fit the narrative.

>These were services that acted as clients for the private messaging so they could send media directly to your friends via FB messages.

So why wasn't the access write-only? If the only purpose for 3rd party access to messages was to send messages, there is no reason they should have been able to read any messages. Seems like a pretty trivial, obvious function - I certainly have keys for send-only access to email accounts to let web apps send things on my behalf with minimal possible privacy exposure.

You could both send and receive messages from within the Spotify app.

I was just using the sign in via FB or Google as an example of times where user might not know what they are consenting to. I wouldn’t assume this gives the 3rd party access to my emails.

This is exactly where we need congress to step in and regulate personal data.

I’ve built rest APIs at work and I almost always restrict this type of behavior. Why weren’t they only given access to create PMs and update PMs they create? No requests to pull all the PMs of a certain user.

You may well have been asked for explicit consent to message access. The New York Times is specifically vague about this. They could tell us what kind of access was asked for, but they do not even mention that any kind of access was asked for. Why?

According to the Verge Apple had acces to data even if the user explicitly disabled data sharing.

>Giving Apple access to users’ Facebook contacts and calendar entries, even if they had disabled data sharing, as part of a partnership that still exists.

> According to the Verge Apple had acces to data even if the user explicitly disabled data sharing.

First, the Verge article (https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...) did not do any original reporting, they are referencing the New York Times. This is another thing - people think stories have more weight and truth than they do because you've got a 100 publications writing about some other publications article.

The New York Times article makes this claim, but does not explain what "explicitly disabling data sharing" means.

Are they saying that I sign in to Spotify, I am asked to give access, I say no, but Spotify still gets the data? That would indeed be bad. It is unlikely this has happened. If this did happen, it would be worth a couple of words of explanation more, no?

They are instead likely referring to this dialog: https://c-7npsfqifvt0x24dofu4x2edctjtubujdx2edpn.g00.cnet.co...

Best guess, they are saying, although my friend disabled all the options in this dialog, I was still able to grant third parties access to my contact list and my messages, which included my friends data - that makes sense to me: I can't use a chat app if half the messages you sent me are missing.

In any case, we have to guess what really happened, because the New York Times can't be bothered to tell us.

More importantly, a message you send to me belongs to me as well. If I want to use a third party messaging client which runs on the server of company X, then I am free to do so.

How would that work with email clients?

"I have way less trust for our tech illiterate congress than I do for Facebook." That is a perfectly fine position for you to take. But if you consider that a majority of the citizenry also does not understand the ramifications of "API integrations", doesn't it seem like the Congress is reasonably representative of the population? And that in that case, recent revelations might lead them to being fed up?