Greg's Corner

Facebook can’t stop sharing our data

As it turns out, the Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t the first time Facebook allegedly shared personal user information to third-parties on a grand scale. According to a New York Times report, Facebook has been sharing extensive user information with device manufacturers for close to a decade if not more. Some of those companies are said to have included Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung.

A Times reporter was supposedly able to use a 5-year-old Blackberry phone to access the personal information of close to 300,000 Facebook users. This ranged from friends to friends of friends and so on. Facebook hasn’t expressly denied that device makers didn’t have access to this information but instead claims that no information has been misused by any of its device partners. In response to this report, Apple has stated that it never requested any information from Facebook. Apple even took it a step further at their most recent developers conference when they introduced a new feature to iOS that would block Facebook’s tracking capabilities.

Should we be surprised about this latest look at how Facebook handle’s our privacy? Probably not. Facebook isn’t a non-profit. They’re in business to make money. The way they make their money is through targeted advertising and for that Facebook needs as much of our personal information as possible. Yet, as Facebook users, we are more than happy to hand that information over to them just so we can satiate our social media addictions. Facebook won’t stop using our information until we stop supplying it to them.