Facebook gathers any kind of information maybe from its users, such that one discovered SMS_s and the list of calls among the data downloaded from the account or from the social network. We are talking about an Android user who uses an old version of the operating system and who for a short period of time allowed the Facebook application for Android to have access to his call list, but the extracted information covers a long period of time.
Facebook had access to the user's call list and SMS for a week, after which the access was theoretically revoked, but the application would have continued to collect the data for several months between 2016 and 2017. How did Facebook manage to collect information from the user for such a long period of time is hard to understand, since access to the data has been revoked, but since we are talking about Facebook, maybe nothing should surprise us anymore.
Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file
Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD
- Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018
Facebook extracts the SMS and the call list from the phones
Facebook can request access to the contact address on the iPhone or iPad, and in the case of Facebook Messenger, access to other additional information can be requested in order to be able to send SMS or make calls to various people. If in iPhone the access of the Facebook application to data is limited, in the case of Android things are different and the application can access much more information, and in some versions of Android, even with revoked permissions.
a historical record of every single contact on my phone, including ones I no longer have pic.twitter.com/XfiRX6qgHl
- Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018
Facebook extracted data about all the calls and SMS messages existing in that phone, without the user's permission, and the disclosure comes in the context of the whole scandal DeleteFacebook and Cambridge Analytica. That Facebook collects absolutely everything it can from users should not surprise anyone, but as the scandal expands, we will learn more and more details about the size of the information the company has about us.
