For the past few days, Facebook has been accused of disclosing people’s private messages to partners without their knowledge. Facebook clarified that it worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends only if they chose Facebook login.
Facebook says that users could message their friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix, share folders on Dropbox, or get receipts from money transfers through the Royal Bank of Canada app. These experiences were publicly discussed.
For the same reason, in order for you to write a message to a friend from within Spotify, for instance, the company needed to give Spotify “write access.” For you to be able to read messages back, it needed Spotify to have “read access.” “Delete access” meant that if you deleted a message from within Spotify, it would also delete from Facebook. No third party was reading your private messages or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Opposing the reports floating to the internet, Facebook didn’t oblige to the fact that it was shipping over private messages to partners.
Facebook says that it has been public about these features and partnerships over the years. Facebook had integration partnerships over the years with Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies, which were overseen by our partnerships and product teams. Now it has shut down nearly all of these partnerships over the past several months, except with Amazon and Apple, which people continue to find useful and which are covered by active contracts; Tobii, an integration that enables people with ALS to access Facebook; and browser notifications for people who use Alibaba, Mozilla and Opera.