Snippet: Facebook Shares With Friends ☇

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore for The New York Times:

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s 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. […]

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s 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.

Holy shit (okay, I’m not really that surprised). What a soulless, sociopathic, terrible company and yet, neither regulators nor its users are really making it answer for its transgressions. While I deleted my account about a year ago, I try not to be the person who leads with, “I deleted my Facebook account.” Friends mention something they saw on there and forget that I didn’t see it, catching themselves, and I feel like I really haven’t missed much. The thing is, everyone knows its bad, but doesn’t seem to care.