Facebook FB, -0.18% made agreements with at least 60 makers of phones and other devices that gave them access to the personal information of users’ friends without their consent, The New York Times reported Monday, citing company officials. Facebook said in a blog post that device makers it partnered with “signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.” Facebook also said partners like Apple AAPL, +0.02% and Amazon AMZN, +1.87% couldn’t “integrate the user’s Facebook features with their devices without the user’s permission.”
Facebook logins can be sold for $5.20 each because they allow criminals to have access to personal data that could potentially let them hack into more of an individual’s accounts. The credentials to a PayPal PYPL, +0.57% account with a relatively high balance can be sold on the dark web for $247 on average, the report found. One’s entire online identity, including personal identification numbers and hacked financial accounts, can be sold for only about $1,200 on the dark web, Fractl found.
Facebook integration has been a thing for quite some time, with the social media firm giving companies access to its users’ data via built-in address books, like systems and log-in features. While this sounds relatively harmless, Facebook has now been caught giving Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Blackberry and at least 56 other manufacturers “deep access” to each user and their friends without consent. The New York Times reports that this has been a long-term partnership with the companies over the last decade, in the social media platform’s bid to gain dominance. This deal supposedly continued even after Facebook made it known it would comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s consent decree, which was meant to put a stop to the gathering of data without a direct agreement between the party and the firm. This is but another skeleton out of Facebook’s closet, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw founder Mark Zuckerberg in front of the US Congress. During investigations, the platform emphasised that it had previously put measures in place back in 2014, that hoped to limit the amount of data third-party firms could gather.