Facebook Caught Accessing Users’ Private Messages

In early 2012, an investigation by The Sunday Times of London revealed that Facebook had been quietly reading the text messages of smartphone users who installed the company’s mobile application. The social media giant confirmed it was harvesting this data as part of an internal trial aimed at developing its own standalone messaging platform.

A Widespread Practice Among Popular Apps

Facebook was far from the only offender. The investigation found that several other major platforms — including photo-sharing service Flickr, dating app Badoo, and Yahoo Messenger — were also accessing personal data such as text messages from users’ devices. Some applications went even further: certain apps reportedly had the capability to intercept live phone calls, while others, including YouTube, could allegedly activate smartphone cameras remotely to capture photos or video without the user’s knowledge.

Smaller apps were implicated as well. Security tool My Remote Lock and the game Tennis Juggling were both flagged as potentially intercepting users’ phone calls.

Privacy Advocates Sound the Alarm

Emma Draper of Privacy International warned at the time that personal information had become a valuable commodity, noting that companies would pursue aggressive strategies to collect as much user data as possible. With over 400,000 apps available on Android and more than 500,000 on iOS — all governed by blanket terms and conditions policies — the scale of potential data harvesting was enormous.

Users Rarely Read the Fine Print

A YouGov poll conducted for the newspaper found that 70 percent of smartphone users rarely or never read the terms and conditions before downloading an app. This widespread habit of blindly accepting permissions meant that most users had no idea what access they were granting to their most private communications and device functions.