Masters of the Universe: Facebook Admits to Sharing User Data with 61 Companies

Facebook has admitted to sharing the personal data of its users with 61 different companies.

Social media giant Facebook admitted recently to giving access to their user’s data to 61 other hardware and software developers after claiming that they had stopped this practice in May 2015 CNET reports. The company delivered a 747 page document to Congress on Friday in response to the hundreds of questions left unanswered by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his hearing before members of Congress in April.

The social media Masters of the Universe stated that they had arranged a special “one-time” six-month extension to the 61 companies, including AOL, USPS, a dating app named Hinge and many more, so that they could update their services to become compliant with the site’s new privacy policy. Some of the data shared with the companies during this time period included friends’ names, genders and birth dates.

In the documents submitted to Congress, the company stated: “We engaged companies to build integrations for a variety of devices, operating systems and other products where we and our partners wanted to offer people a way to receive Facebook or Facebook experiences. These integrations were built by our partners, for our users, but approved by Facebook.” The company further stated that they had discovered that five other companies “theoretically could have accessed limited friends’ data” due to a beta test on the platform.

The company further stated in the documents that they have ended 38 partnerships and have further plans to discontinue seven more by the end of July. This is the platform’s second attempt to expand on Zuckerberg’s comments before Congress. In June the company released a number of written replies to questions from Congress. This included replies to Congress’ questions about Facebook creating advertising profiles of internet users that don’t have a Facebook account, the company stated.

“We do not create profiles for non-Facebook users, nor do we use browser and app logs for non-Facebook users to show targeted ads from our advertisers to them or otherwise seek to personalize the content they see,” the company said in its response to Udall. “However, we may take the opportunity to show a general ad that is unrelated to the attributes of the person or an ad encouraging the non-user to sign up for Facebook.”

Facebook also expanded on the type of content they remove from their platform stating: “When something crosses the line into hate speech, it has no place on Facebook, and we are committed to removing it from our platform any time we become aware of it.”