Facebook Denies Logging Call and SMS History Without Permission

Facebook has been on the hot seat for the past one week and it started from the circus that has been Cambridge Analytica’s scandal that was covered by the Guardian. Allegedly data from 50 million Facebook profiles was harvested via an app which twas then used to create models for target advertisements.

This privacy breach led to Facebook’s stock to dip and consequently its market capitalization to take a nosedive from this story. People on social media also called for deleting their Facebook profiles due to this debacle and this also includes high profile figures like Tesla & Space X’s CEO, Elon Musk.

In the spirit of downloading one’s Facebook data, a guy by the name Dylan decided to check out his Facebook data and found something startling: Apparently Facebook was logging his entire call history with his partner’s mum.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

He also found out that there was a record of every single contact on his phone even the ones he didn’t have, metadata about text messages received or sent and metadata about the cellular calls ever made.

metadata about every text message I've ever received or sent

spoiler: I don't use messenger for SMS pic.twitter.com/ehWXhpnrrV

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

The entire thread was incredibly popular on Twitter and it shows how much tracking Facebook does and the company has decided to respond to these sort of tracking claims.

“You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” they said on the post.

Facebook clarified that call and text logging are opt in  features for people who use Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android and people have to ‘expressly agree’ to use the feature. Interesting enough, they didn’t mention the regular full featured Facebook for Android app, full featured Messenger app and the iOS app, which is kind of weird.

The company also was quick to clarify that when you turn on the ability to continuously upload your contacts and your call/text history, the feature does not collect the content of your calls or texts. Apparently this information is ‘securely stored’ and not sold to third parties.

This looks like so when you check out Dylan’s thread and you would be shocked to realize how much data Facebook mines from your account. Also, this post by Facebook aptly titled ‘Fact Check’ was to quell the fire from its data mining activities which was fueled by the Cambridge Analytica story and its subsequent ban by the company and we are yet to see what they will do next to gain the public’s trust.