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DATA MINING: Facebook gave Netflix, Spotify & Amazon access to users private messages, reports say

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US govt to force Facebook to decrypt Messenger

Facebook gave technology companies more access to personal user data than was previously made public, according to “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents” obtained by the New York Times.

Facebook’s privacy practices are the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Per the Times, the new records portray the “most complete picture yet” of Facebook’s practices of sharing its users’ data.

Almost every friend of Facebook users could be accessible in Microsoft Bing searches without permission, the NYT reports.

Read also: Facebook discovers bug that accessed private pictures of 6.8m users

Netflix and Spotify had access to users’ Facebook messages while Amazon had user contact information and names through their Facebook friends, and even though Facebook said earlier this year that it had stopped sharing friends’ posts, Yahoo could see them “as recently as this summer.”

Facebook has been under intense scrutiny in recent months after it disclosed a major security breach that could have left as many as 50 million users’ accounts vulnerable.

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