Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones

Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 25 March 2018
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Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts."

As always, if you're really concerned about privacy, you should not share address book and call-log data with any mobile application. And you may want to examine the rest of what can be found in the downloadable Facebook archive, as it includes all the advertisers that Facebook has shared your contact information with, among other things.

Just because it is "widely used practice", it's not per default good. Furthermore, there is also the interesting question what happens with information about people who are not registered with FB; these people never agreed to the TOS, so it might very well be illegal for FB to collect this personal data. Not that Zuckerberg, who calls his users "dumb fucks", cares (yet).