Skip to main content

Facebook Collected Your Android Call History and SMS Data For Years

facebook-privacy
Facebook knows a lot about you, your likes and dislikes—it's no surprise.

But do you know, if you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the company had been collecting your contacts, SMS, and call history data at least until late last year.

A tweet from Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer, which received more than 38,000 retweets (at the time of writing), showed how he found his year-old data—including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages—in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook.

Facebook was collecting this data on its users from last few years, which was even reported earlier in media, but the story did not get much attention at that time.

Since Facebook had been embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last week, tweets from McKay went viral and has now fueled the never-ending privacy debate.

A Facebook spokesperson explained, since almost all social networking sites have been designed to make it easier for users to connect with their friends and family members, Facebook also uploads its users’ contacts to offer same.

As Ars reported, in older versions of Android when permissions were a lot less strict, the Facebook app took away contact permission at the time of installation that allowed the company access to call and message data automatically.

Eventually, Google changed the way Android permissions worked in version 16 of its API, making them more clear and granular by informing users whenever any app tries to execute permissions.

However, developers were able to bypass this change, and Facebook continued accessing call and SMS data until Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October last year.

Even you can check what data the social network has collected on you so far by going to your Facebook's Settings→Download a copy of your Facebook data→Start My Archive.

If you don't want Facebook to store or continuously upload your contacts to its server, you can turn off the continuous uploading setting in the Messenger app. This change will also delete all your previously uploaded contacts.

Facebook users on Apple devices are on the safer side, as iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.
Labels:
Location: Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phishing Campaigns Targeting Google and Yahoo Accounts To Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication Several phishing campaigns targeting hundreds of individuals across the Middle East and North Africa. The attacker targers HRDs, journalists, political actors. Amnesty International published a report on multiple campaigns that traget self-described “secure email” services, such as Tutanota and ProtonMail and another campaign that aimed in bypassing two-factor authentication. Crafted Phishing Sites – Secure Email Providers The phishing campaign primarily targeted popular secure email service providers such as Tutanota and ProtonMail. Threat actors used a well-crafted phishing page – by obtaining the domain tutanota[.]org, whereas the original domain of the service provider is tutanota[.]com. A phishing attack is one of the dangerous social engineering attacks that leads to capture a victim’s username and password that will get store it to an attacker machine and reuse it l...
Post a Comment
Read more

software development services in noida

Red Securium Company Provide Software Development  Service In Noida Combining technological competency with domain expertise, Red Securium offers full spectrum of custom software design, development and deployment services for enterprises and SMEs to achieve exceptional business results.            Leveraging on its cross-functional width of expertise in application software development , Red Securium has developed the capabilities to build and run resilient applications at scale that seamlessly infuse your innovative ideas. Whether you are in need of the rapid development of a crucial business application or require the deployment and support for an entire suite of applications, we offer full software lifecycle coverage services. We adopt best practices and put highest levels of expertise to drive your technological assets deliver you business excellence and improved ROI. Custom Software Development Services in Noida Enterpri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tr0ll 1.0 – Vulnhub CTF Challenge Walkthrough

  Tr0ll 1.0 is an intentionally vulnerable machine, which is more of a   CTF  like type than real world scenario. Nevertheless, this machine has its own difficulties and you can learn some new stuff from it. So, let’s start. Enumeration Phase Let’s first run  netdiscover  to find the IP of our machine. netdiscover -r 192.168.1.1/24 After that, we run our typical  nmap  scan to see the open ports in the machine. nmap -A -sS -Pn -vv [target] Great we see many interesting stuff here. First of all, there is an open  FTP  port and we can connect to it with  anonymous access .  Also there is an open  http  port, we will run a nikto scan for it. The  ssh  port will be valuable later. From the nikto scan we got an interesting  /secret/  folder. When we get inside, we can understand why the machine got this name. Nothing interesting here, as you can see. we got trolled Let’s connect ...
Post a Comment
Read more