Facebook defends sharing users’ messages

MANILA, Philippines — Under fire over data privacy concerns, social media company Facebook has defended itself over the access it gave to some of its partners to users’ private messages.

Ime Archibong, Facebook vice president of product partnerships, on Wednesday denied a report that users were not aware their private messages were made accessible to companies such as Spotify and Netflix. 

“We worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends – but only if they chose to use Facebook Login. These experiences are common in our industry,” he said. 

He pointed out that “people could message their friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix, share folders on Dropbox or get receipts from money transfers through the Royal Bank of Canada app.”

“These experiences were publicly discussed and they were clear to users and only available when people logged into these services with Facebook,” he added. 

The social network came under fire this week following a New York Times report that detailed the disclosure of personal data of users to some of its partners. Among the allegations was the supposed access to users’ private messages given to some of the companies. 

Archibong confirmed that private messages were made accessible to the partners, but maintained that users were made aware of it and have given their consent. 

“Why did the messaging partners have read/write/delete messaging access? That was the point of this feature – for the messaging partners mentioned above, we worked with them to build messaging integrations into their apps so people could send messages to their Facebook friends,” he said. 

The Facebook official noted that when access is given, this would enable a user to write a message to a Facebook friend, read back or delete messages from within an app like Spotify. 
“No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct,” Archibong claimed.

“These partnerships were agreed via extensive negotiations and documentation, detailing how the third party would use the API (application programming interface), and what data they could and couldn’t access,” he stressed.
The partnerships, he added, were experimental and have been shut down for over three years.