Report: Facebook Let Netflix and Spotify Read Users’ Private Messages

Embattled social giant Facebook granted its business partners Spotify and Netflix the ability to read users’ private messages, according to information obtained by the New York Times. 

Facebook also reportedly also gave a cabal of Silicon Valley tech giants access to detailed personal information about its users without their consent. The companies include Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo.

Via The New York Times:

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

Among the companies that were granted privileged access to user data was The New York Times itself.

Spotify, which could view messages of more than 70 million users a month, still offers the option to share music through Facebook Messenger. But Netflix and the Canadian bank no longer needed access to messages because they had deactivated features that incorporated it.

These were not the only companies that had special access longer than they needed it. Yahoo, The Times and others could still get Facebook users’ personal information in 2017.

Yahoo could view real-time feeds of friends’ posts for a feature that the company had ended in 2011. A Yahoo spokesman declined to discuss the partnership in detail but said the company did not use the information for advertising. The Times — one of nine media companies named in the documents — had access to users’ friend lists for an article-sharing application it also had discontinued in 2011. A spokeswoman for the news organization said it was not obtaining any data. [emphasis ours]

Read the full story at The New York Times. 

Update: A Netflix spokesperson contacted Breitbart News with the following statement:

“Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social. One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so.”

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.