Facebook let Netflix and Spotify read the private messages of its users

The New York Times reports that Facebook let Netflix and Spotify read the private messages of its users among other things; everything it's said about protecting user privacy has been a slippery lie of one sort or another.

For years, Facebook gave some of the worlds largest technology companies more intrusive access to users personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. ... Facebook allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

You'll always be dumb fucks to him. Read the rest