After embarking on exactly the kind of cringe-inducing apology tour one would expect following the revelation that Cambridge Analytica plundered the data of millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg has yet another mess on his hands. On the weekend, Android owners had discovered that Facebook had been collecting text messages and metadata for phone calls over many years, until the Ars Technica reported it in the user agreement brochure Hidden operation. Because of Facebook's free service, it has been fast to keep practice, as they are free, to those who are starting to understand that they and their data are according to the needs of the product.
In the current iteration, the Facebook Messenger application requires that people who downloaded it have permission to access incoming and outgoing calls and text logs. However, when a user was asked to download a copy of personal data before the user completely deleted the Facebook account, a certain amount of data was secretly sucked up without explicit permission. In these data caches, certain detailed information was unstable, and in some cases phone or text messages sent on the Android device were all unstable. Dylan McKay, who seems to have an Android phone, from November 2016 to July 2017, his archive includes "All mobile phone metadata, time and duration" and "All Meta data on text messages I have ever received or sent "When people like McKay agreed to share contacts with Facebook, they will be able to access their personal information I did not know the degree to give Facebook access.
Facebook posted the applicable user consent clause and answered with a blog post denying that Facebook is gathering phone and SMS data secretly. "Contact uploading is optional and explicitly asks if you want to grant permission to upload contacts from your phone and is described in the app at the beginning," the company said in a statement by Guardian I will. "Users can delete previously uploaded information at any time and you can find all the information available for accounts and activity logs from the tool to download your information.
But the revelation couldn’t have come at a worse time for Facebook, which is trying—and failing—to dig itself out from under the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. On Sunday, the company released a full-page print advertisement in the U.K.’s The Observer, The Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express, and the Sunday Telegraph, along with American newspapers The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to regain public trust. In the ad, Zuckerberg called the Cambridge Analytica leak a “breach of trust” and apologized, reassuring readers that “we’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” but so far it seems to have missed the mark. According to a poll from SurveyMonkey and Axios published on Monday, Facebook’s already-low favorability rating has dropped twice as much as that of other tech giants from October 2017 to March 2018.
