The social networking giant Facebook has acknowledged snooping on text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and said that it was accessing the data as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service, according to reports appearing in The (London) Sunday Times.
But according to another popular technology site Cnet, Facebook has since reportedly refuted accessing people’s texts. It said it was running “a limited test of mobile features which integrate with SMS functionality”, but that the ability to read and write text messages “is not currently implemented for most users of the mobile app”.
“As part of this test, we declared the presence of that functionality within our app store permissions starting with the 1.7 version of our application. If Facebook ultimately launches any feature that makes use of these permissions, we will ensure that this is accompanied by appropriate guidance and/or educational materials.”
A spokesman for Facebook says while nothing has been launched yet, users will be prompted to give permission when the feature debuts.
Elaborating further it noted-“The permission is obviously revealed on the app page in the Android marketplace and is in anticipation of new features that allows users to integrate Facebook features with their texts,” a spokesman for Facebook said in a statement. However, other than some very limited experiments, we have not launched anything yet so we are not using the permission.
The Sunday Times is also asserting that other well-known group of web entities are also accessing smartphone users’ personal data-such as text messages-including photo-sharing site Flickr, dating site Badoo and Yahoo Messenger, the paper said. Additionally, the report also added that the information such as user location, contacts list, and browser history are often accessed and sometimes beamed to third-party companies, including advertisers.
Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to a CNET request for comment, but the company informed the Business Insider that the Sunday Times report was “completely wrong.”
“So the Sunday Times is completely wrong when it says Facebook is reading people’s SMS. Wrong on the terminology, and wrong on the suggestion that it has been implemented,” the company said.
Notably, as marketers vying for ever-increasing volumes of detail about the day-to-day lives of smartphone-toting potential customers in an attempt to develop highly targeted advertising, personal information is becoming a highly prized commodity.
Emma Draper, of the Privacy International campaign group, said, “Your personal information is a precious commodity, and companies will go to great extents to lay their hands on as much of it as possible.”
With more than 400,000 apps can be downloaded to Android phones, and more than 500,000 are available for iPhones-with all apps downloaded from Apple’s App Store covered by the same terms and conditions policy. Hence, leveraging a smartphone application to collect information such as frequently used words, websites visited and topics discussed online (or in calls), means that the erosion of privacy is almost inevitable.