ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Was Fully Aware That Tracking Who People Call and Text Is Creepy But Did It Anyway.

via gizmodo:

The business team wanted to get Bluetooth permissions so it could push ads to people’s phones when they walked into a store. Meanwhile, the growth team, which is responsible for getting more and more people to join Facebook, wanted to get “Read Call Log Permission” so that Facebook could track everyone whom an Android user called or texted with in order to make better friend recommendations to them. (Yes, that’s how Facebook may have historically figured out with whom you went on one bad Tinder date and then plopped them into “People You May Know.”) According to internal emails recently seized by the UK Parliament, Facebook’s business team recognized that what the growth team wanted to do was incredibly creepy and was worried it was going to cause a PR disaster.

In a February 4, 2015, email that encapsulates the issue, Facebook Bluetooth Beacon product manager Mike Lebeau is quoted saying that the request for “read call log” permission was a “pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.”

I’ve had a question for a while now, but have never found an answer to it. When you give the Facebook app permission to open your photo library so you can post a picture to your timeline, exactly how much access does Facebook get and for how long?

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h/t SG

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