Facebook Again Admits To Improperly Sharing User Data With App Developers

Facebook has repeatedly gotten in trouble in the past for improperly sharing user data with third-party app developers. So you’d think the social media giant would be extra careful about making sure it didn’t happen again. However, that was not the case, as the company revealed this week that it once again shared users’ non-public data well beyond the point when it should’ve stopped.

According to Facebook itself, the company shared user information that “possibly” included email addresses, birthdays, language, and gender with around 5,000 apps. What’s worse, Facebook says this data was provided up to 90 days after a user last used an app.

“[Recently], we discovered that in some instances apps continued to receive the data that people had previously authorized, even if it appeared they hadn’t used the app in the last 90 days,” Facebook VP of platform partnerships Konstantinos Papamiltiadis wrote in a blog post revealing the error. “For example, this could happen if someone used a fitness app to invite their friends from their hometown to a workout, but we didn’t recognize that some of their friends had been inactive for many months.”

Of course, Facebook was vague about how recently it discovered this “mistake,” and the company promised that it was working on addressing the issue. However, this is far too costly of slip-up to continue happening, and Facebook needs to put an end to it ASAP.




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