What to make of the New York Times’ latest story about Facebook’s broad data-sharing agreements?The story, which draws on internal documents describing the company’s partnerships, reports on previously undisclosed aspects of business partnerships with companies including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, and Netflix.
In some cases, companies had access to data years after it was supposed to have been cut off.The access described in the Times story falls into three types of Facebook partnerships. The first are what Facebook calls “integrations,” and they refer to custom-built apps that Facebook built for OEMs like BlackBerry.
Because they were integrated with phone operating systems, they require a broad exchange of data with OEMs. They’ve gotten a lot of attention this year, but I think most users would reasonably assume that their personaldata was being exchanged with the phone manufacturer in those cases.
The second type of partnerships, which is represented by the Bing deal, are part of a now-defunct program called “instant personalization.”This feature, which launched in 2010, opted every Facebook user in by default. It allowed all of its partners to personalize their own services using whatever Facebook knew about you and was willing to share. Yelp, for example, would show visitors which of their Facebook friends used the site when they visited.
“Facebook’s partners don’t get to ignore people’s privacy settings, and it’s wrong to suggest that they do,” said Steve Satterfield,director of privacy and public policy at Facebook, in an email. “Over the years, we’ve partnered with other companies so people can use
Facebook on devices and platforms that we don’t support ourselves.
Unlike a game, streaming music service, or other third-party app,which offer experiences that are independent of Facebook, these partners can only offer specific Facebook features and are unable to use informationfor independent purposes.”
Here are two last things to chew over as we think about this story in the coming days. One, it’s now clear that a data partnership with Facebook can create reputational risks for the companies making the deals. Every company named in the report will be held account for the Times’ findings, and they better have good and thorough answers when shareholders, lawmakers, and reporters start asking.
Two, it’s amazing how much oxygen we all have given to the false notion that Facebook sells your data — when the real story was the data they were giving away.
