Facebook apps secretly sending sensitive data back to the mothership

A trio of privacy earthquakes shook Facebooklandia on Friday.

TL;DR: It turns out that…

  1. Eleven third-party apps are sharing our sensitive data with Facebook. Don’t want the network to know when you menstruate? The purchase price for that house you ogled? Tough. News about the oversharing came from the Wall Street Journal [paywalled] on Friday, and as a result…
  2. New York’s governor called on two state agencies to investigate this “secret” sharing of health and financial data, which apparently violates Facebook’s own policies, and which is reportedly done to both non-Facebook users and non-logged-in users, without much by way of explicit user consent. Meanwhile…
  3. 60 pages of un-redacted legal documents from a lawsuit between Facebook and app developer Six4Three were anonymously posted on GitHub. The documents haven’t been independently confirmed, The Guardian reports, but Facebook hasn’t denied their authenticity. The internal emails reveal that Facebook planned to spy on Android users and that Facebook itself had what it called a near-fatal brush with a data privacy breach when a third-party app came close to disclosing its financial results ahead of schedule.

Read full news article on Naked Security

 


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