For years, Facebook gave many large technology companies special access to users’ information. Here’s how it worked.
Facebook for years gave major tech companies, including Yahoo and Netflix, greater access to people’s data than it disclosed, a New York Times investigation found. The partnerships helped Facebook draw new users, ramp up its advertising revenue and embed itself on sites across the web.
This is how some of the key deals worked.
Yahoo
In 2011, when Yahoo and Facebook announced their partnership, social networking features were seen as crucial to attracting users to existing websites. In a news release that September, Yahoo announced that it was “putting people’s friends front and center to usher in an innovative way of connecting around content socially.”
Yahoo said people who opted in to its new features would see their Facebook friends and the articles those friends had read, in a “facebar” at the top of the Yahoo News site.
As with many social features from that time, the integration did not work as well as the companies had hoped, and it soon ended. Yet Yahoo maintained special data access for more than 80,000 accounts, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Times. As recently as this summer, Yahoo was able to view a stream of posts from these people’s friends, and it is unclear what the company did with that information. A Yahoo spokesman said the company did not use the information for advertising.
Netflix and Spotify
Netflix and Spotify received access to people’s Facebook messages as part of features that allowed people to suggest movies, TV shows and music to friends. On Netflix, for example, after watching a show, a viewer would be prompted to connect to Facebook and recommend it.
Netflix promoted the arrangement in 2014 as more privacy-sensitive than posting people’s viewing habits on their Facebook pages. Using Facebook Messenger allowed people to “easily, and privately, recommend the shows you love to the people you care about,” Netflix said in a 2014 blog post.
To accomplish such sharing, the Netflix application had to be able to send Facebook messages. But Netflix was given the ability not only to send private messages but also to read, write and delete them, and to see all participants on a thread. A Netflix spokesman said the company was not aware it had been granted such broad powers and had used the access only for messages sent by the recommendation feature.
Netflix deactivated the feature about a year after it was introduced, but documents show that the company still had access to users’ messages in 2017.
Spotify, which continues to offer its own similar recommendation feature, also said it was unaware of the special access.
‘Instant Personalization’
Facebook, in a quest to bind other corners of the web to its social network, shared data with several major websites in a program called “instant personalization.” These partners, which included Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Rotten Tomatoes, the movie and television review site, got access to users’ names, gender, profile photos and any other information they had made public.
Beginning in 2010, if people visited one of those partner sites while logged in to Facebook, a blue bar on the screen would let them know the site was receiving their Facebook data to personalize what they saw. For example, people might see what movies their friends liked, or get tailored search results based on preferences gleaned from Facebook.
Facebook eventually wound down instant personalization, but it continued to allow some sites, including Bing and Rotten Tomatoes, access to much of the same data they had been getting for the discontinued feature.
‘People You May Know’
The internal documents shed light on a Facebook feature called “People You May Know,” a friend-suggestion tool that has long confused and unsettled users.
Gizmodo and other outlets have reported that the tool has recommended connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members and people who had simply been in the same location, prompting suspicions that the company was closely tracking users’ whereabouts, listening to their conversations and more.
In some deals, Facebook shared information with other companies and in turn received people’s contact details — data Facebook used to develop complex friend network models and suggest more connections, the documents show. The partners that fed information to the tool included Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei.
The New York Times
The Times, one of nine media companies named in the documents, developed a social-sharing application called TimesPeople in 2008.
The tool incorporated Facebook friend lists and allowed people to share articles and make recommendations to other readers. The feature was shut down in 2011, but The Times continued to have access to friend lists until 2017. The Times spokeswoman said they were unaware of the continued access and were not receiving any data for the feature from Facebook.
According to a report on New York Times