New Reports Says Facebook Harvests Call And Texting Info From Android Phones


Facebook Addiction Sex Cocaine Opiods

Shutterstock


According to a new report from Ars Technica, Facebook has been collecting detailed call histories and text messaging data from Android for years. Following Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal, users started investigating what kind of data the social media giant has been collecting from them. Some Facebook users discovered that the social network possibly scraped call and texting info from their Android phones.

Last week, a tweet exposing the detailed information collected from phones went viral. Dylan McKay from New Zealand found that Facebook had harvested approximately two years of phone call metadata from his Android phone. The sensitive information included call history, phone numbers, length of calls, time of calls, call duration, contacts, and text messages.

This prompted other Facebook users to see what personal information that Facebook has taken from their Android smartphones. More users found that Facebook collects info like this after searching their archive data.

Facebook has responded that the data collection was not done “surreptitiously.” Mark Zuckerberg’s company responded with a blog post that users “opt-in” to these “features” when they sign-up for Messenger or Facebook Lite. “This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook,” the blog states. Facebook denies that they sell this data. Facebook said they “do not collect the content of your text messages or calls.”

The recent data scandal has started the #DeleteFacebook campaign, where users close down their Facebook page. Recently, Elon Musk revealed that he doesn’t use Facebook and removed the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla.