Facebook, an American online social media and social networking service company, is one of the most popular social networking services. It allows users to chat with their friends and do other activities such as like posts, comment on posts, share digital media, etc.
Recently, Facebook has been accused of sharing its users’ data with other technology companies. A report in the New York Times claims that the social networking service has been sharing data with huge platforms like the Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Amazon without the users’ permission, going against its privacy policy. The report is based on internal records as well as interrogations and evaluations and says that the data shared by Facebook with the technology companies might benefit all the companies that are involved. It may help the companies improve their products and make them more appealing to the public.
It has been reported that although Facebook announced that they have stopped sharing data with other companies, the social media firm still shared users’ names and contact information with Amazon as well as users’ friends’ posts with Yahoo. Names of users’ friends were shared with Microsoft, an American multinational technology company and
companies like Spotify, a Sweden based company, and Royal Bank of Canada, a multinational financial services company, can read, write and delete users’ private messages.
Apple, an American multinational technology company, was given the ability to hide indicators that the iDevice was asking data on Facebook. The contact numbers and calendar entries of people were also shared with Apple but they denied that they were given any access to the data of the Facebook users.