Facebook Gave Private User Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Thursday, June 07, 2018

Facebook has just revealed on Tuesday, June 5, that it has data sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese tech companies. This list includes Huawei, the same company whose devices are now the subject of a proposed ban from U.S. Government use due to concerns over national security.

Part of the agreements between the social media giant and these Chinese electronic companies gave private access to Facebook user data, according to the Seattle Times. That means that Huawei, a company that has been identified by U.S. intelligence officials as a threat to national security, were given access to Facebook user data.

These arrangements, which also include companies like Lenovo, Oppo and TCL, has been in place since at least 2010. After at least eight years of sharing user data with these companies, Facebook officials were quick to add that the company will be shutting down the deal with Huawei by the end of the week.

Texas representative Mike Conaway proposed a bill earlier in January, called the "Defending U.S. Government Communications Act," which primarily aims to ban the U.S. government from buying or using any phones, telecommunications equipment, or services supplied by Huawei, as well as ZTE.

According to Facebook officials, these data-sharing partnerships allowed makers of devices to build in Facebook features like separate "like" buttons, address books and status updates in their products. The social media platform also assured lawmakers that the data sent to Huawei phones resided within each device only.

"All Facebook's integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were controlled from the get-go — and Facebook approved everything that was built," Facebook vice president Francisco Varela said.

"Given the interest from Congress, we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei's servers," the Facebook official added.

Sen. Warner, the top Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, was keen to hear more about this. "I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers," Warner said.

It's not just Chinese phone makers that Facebook has been sharing user data with. According to the report by the New York Times, Facebook has also established data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung, among at least 60 device makers, over the past few years.

These partnerships are now a cause of concern in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where one political consulting firm was able to amass and misuse the private data of tens of millions of Facebook users.

"As more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks," Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out.