Social media giant Facebook admitted that they have shared their user’s data with Indian telecom company Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio’s music app partner Saavn among others.
The social media company said that these all those companies having integration partnerships with Facebook.
The integration partners of the company to build ways for Facebook users to receive Facebook or Facebook features on their device or network within platform use policies of the social media firm.
“Integration partners were not permitted to use data received through Facebook APIs for independent purposes unrelated to the approved integration without user consent,” Facebook said in its submission.
According to the information shared by Facebook, its partnership with Airtel is no longer in force.
Airtel Clarification-
When contacted Airtel spokesperson said, The matter pertains to the year 2010 when Airtel was granted access to data by Facebook as an App developer. The project ended in 2013 and so did the access to the data. We confirm that the data was used only for our internal purposes. We take data privacy extremely seriously and follow a zero tolerance policy on the same.
Facebook named Saavn music app, in which Reliance Jio has invested, among those that have access to user’s friend data based on privacy setting of the friend or only after consent of the friend whose data is to be collected by the third party application.
The US-based social media firm said that in April 2014, the company decided to tighten rules on its platform to prevent abuse.
“At that time we made clear that existing apps would have a year to transition at which point they would be forced to migrate to the more restricted API and be subject to Facebook’s new review and approval protocols. The vast majority of companies were required to make the changes by May 2015,” Facebook said.
Saavn’s name figured among those companies who were given time till May 2015 to comply with rules.
The Fb Data Breach Story-
The breach was discovered by security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire as part of Facebook‘s Data Abuse Bounty program.
The app ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ was downloaded by 335 users in India, which resulted in the company get the access of the data of their friends and family members. The total number is almost 5,62,120 users data they collected in India. However, Facebook said that they suspended the app from its platform in December 2015.
Though Facebook did not unveil the names of those 335 users in India. The report also mentioned that the app was launched on Facebook by a company called Global Science Research, run by Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge.