The New York Times Had Special Access To Facebook Data Without Users’ Knowledge

DC: The New York Times was one of the companies that had access to private user data from Facebook, a key point brushed over in a report released by the paper.

While the Tuesday bombshell focused on how the information from Facebook was mainly shared with major tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify, The Times was one of nine media organizations that also obtained special access to things like a users’ friends lists.

Disclosing such information violated Facebook’s normal privacy rules and was meant to help companies better target consumers, while raising internal advertising revenues, according to the report.

For companies like The Times and Netflix, access to the data of 2.2 billion people could be a goldmine.

Others, like Spotify, even had the ability to read a Facebook user’s private messages between friends, while tech giants like Yahoo could “view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer,” according to the report. Facebook had claimed it ceased such practices years ago.   more here