Facebook may have shared data with Airtel, Jio’s Saavn, 50 others
04 Jul 2018
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Telecom major Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio's music app partner Saavn are among companies that could have had access to data of social media major Facebook, according to submissions made by the social media giant to the US Congress.
The company has named Airtel among firms having ‘integration partnerships’ with Facebook.
"Integration partners were not permitted to use data received through Facebook APIs for independent purposes unrelated to the approved integration without user consent," Facebook said in its submission.
According to the information shared by Facebook, its partnership with Airtel is no longer in force.
Facebook’s submission has revealed details of 52 companies with which it had data-sharing partnerships and deals (See: Facebook reveals it shared data with 52 companies, including Chinese firms). The 750-page document answers over 2,000 questions that were raised during the Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional hearing.
The document is addressed to US Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Greg Walden, Ranking Member Frank Pallone and other members of the Committee. The document was handed over on 29 June and is now available online.
Facebook had these data-sharing partnerships with companies in order to help them build integrations or Facebook-like products for their devices. The New York Times had earlier revealed that Facebook gave deep data access to smartphone companies like Samsung, Apple, BlackBerry (when it was manufacturing phones), and Microsoft when it was selling the Lumia smartphone.
Facebook later admitted to partnerships with companies like Oppo, Lenovo, and others as well, but said these were all tightly controlled and there was no misuse of data. It also said these partnerships were different from those with app developers. Now, the full list of companies is out, which includes Airtel.
According to Facebook, 38 of these 52 partnerships have already been discontinued, including that with Airtel.
In reply to media queries, Airtel said, "The matter pertains to the year 2010 when Airtel was granted access to data by Facebook as an App developer. The project ended in 2013 and so did the access to the data. We confirm that the data was used only for our internal purposes. We take data privacy extremely seriously and follow a zero tolerance policy on the same."
Facebook named Saavn music app, in which Reliance Jio has invested, among those that have access to user's friend data based on privacy setting of the friend or only after consent of the friend whose data is to be collected by the third-party application.
The US-based social media firm said that in April 2014, the company decided to tighten rules on its platform to prevent abuse.
"At that time we made clear that existing apps would have a year to transition at which point they would be forced to migrate to the more restricted API and be subject to Facebook's new review and approval protocols. The vast majority of companies were required to make the changes by May 2015," Facebook said.
Saavn's name figured among those companies who were given time till May 2015 to comply with rules.
Facebook also added that the company will shut down an additional seven partnerships by the end of July 2018, and another one by the end of October 2018. However, the partnership with Apple will continue beyond October 2018.
Apple has denied that it ever received any data from Facebook. Previously Apple chief executive Tim Cook had said that the company got zero data from Facebook.
Facebook will also continue partnerships with Mozilla, Alibaba and Opera, which will let users receive notifications from the social network in their web browsers. It claims these companies will not get access to data of users’ friends via these integrations. Prominent names on the list are Acer, Alibaba, Amazon, Alcatel/TCL, Apple, AT&T, BlackBerry, Dell, Garmin, HP/Palm, HTC, Kodak, LG, MediaTek, Motorola/Lenovo, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, T-Mobile, Sprint, Qualcomm, Vodafone, Yahoo, etc.
Significantly, Facebook’s document notes, “It is possible we have not been able to identify some integrations, particularly those made during the early days of our company when our records were not centralised. It is also possible that early records may have been deleted from our system.”
So there may be some partnerships regarding data sharing that Facebook has not mentioned in this list, because it does not have the records to begin with.
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