Facebook Harvested Call and Text Data From Android Phones for Years, New Report Indicates
Facebook and data privacy are some of the biggest topics this week, and as a new report shows, the two just do not go together. A man from New Zealand downloaded an archive of his Facebook data and discovered, among other things, years' worth of phone logs from his Android device.
Facebook is a social media platform, so having two years or perhaps more of one's personal call or text data being harvested by the company is some cause for alarm, to put it mildly. Dylan McKay was just as surprised as anyone as he posted on Twitter his findings.
"Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file. Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum," McKay observed on Twitter, posing a screenshot of logs that Facebook reportedly collected about his outgoing, incoming and missed phone calls.
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Android users also shared their own findings, and the fact that Facebook has been holding on to phone call logs and contact information has been confirmed by Ars Technica's Sean Gallagher with his own Facebook archive, too.
It would appear that Facebook has been silently collecting phone logs and data from Android devices until around October of 2017. The Facebook app does it by asking for permission to read contacts during installation, and due to a loophole in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the permission also lets the app access call and text logs as well.
This loophole has been closed with later versions of Android, but Facebook apps that were written for Android 4.1 could still keep their permissions from the earlier version.
"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," a Facebook representative explained.
Why Facebook collected call logs is another question. The company, meanwhile, is now losing the public trusts in opinion polls even as Facebook is now buying ads to apologize to users for the recent Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
