Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends
This appears to be an API to integrate Facebook chrome and functionality into a mobile OS UI;<p>&gt; “An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.<p>...<p>&gt; Usher Lieberman, a BlackBerry spokesman, said in a statement that the company used Facebook data only to give its own customers access to their Facebook networks and messages. Mr. Lieberman said that the company “did not collect or mine the Facebook data of our customers,” adding that “BlackBerry has always been in the business of protecting, not monetizing, customer data.”<p>&gt; Microsoft entered a partnership with Facebook in 2008 that allowed Microsoft-powered devices to do things like add contacts and friends and receive notifications, according to a spokesman. He added that the data was stored locally on the phone and was not synced to Microsoft’s servers.”<p>The story recounts how the BlackBerry Facebook view could... not surprisingly in any way... render your Facebook friends’ information which you are <i>supposed</i> to be able to access.<p>But the NYT apparently thinks this is nefarious in some way.<p>&gt; “The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.<p>&gt; The BlackBerry device was also able to retrieve identifying information for nearly 295,000 Facebook users. Most of them were second-degree Facebook friends of the reporter, or friends of friends.”<p>...How the hell else do you suppose the UI was rendering your Facebook Feed?! Maybe they thought BlackBerry used magic unicorns to render the Facebook UI components on their Hub view.<p>If only there was a term to describe when media sites write a non-story to stir up fake controversy by smearing a popular target...