How Facebook Is Sharing Your Messages with Other Companies and Tracking Your Location (Even If You’ve Opted Out)

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This week was filled with news about how Facebook has been invading your privacy. Two articles earlier in the week exposed the ways in which Facebook is sharing your data, messages and location.

Both articles are alarming because they go against most people’s understanding of how their information will be used by Facebook.

Facebook Sharing Your Messages and Data with Other Companies

Bad news if you’ve been using Facebook Messenger thinking that your messages are private. Well, it turns out that they’re not as private as you might expect. Not even a little bit.

We’re not talking just that Facebook has access to them. It turns out that Facebook provided access to your Messenger messages to other companies, including Netflix, Spotify and Royal Bank of Canada.

And by “access” I don’t mean that Facebook gave these companies only the ability to read your messages. That would be bad enough.

“Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread.” This is according to a New York Times article earlier this week that revealed the results of an investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices. The New York Times, As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants. In its investigation, the Times reporters reviewed 270 pages of internal documents, as well as interviewed current and past Facebook employees.

According to the article, these third-party companies could not only read, but also write and delete messages in your Facebook Messenger account. They also had access to the names of all of your Facebook friends in a group chat in Messages.

According to the articles, Facebook allowed these companies to have access to users’ accounts and messages without users’ consent because the company considered them not to be third parties, but rather extensions of Facebook. A Facebook representative said in the article that “the F.T.C. agreement did not require the social network to secure users’ consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself.”

Facebook’s Response to The New York Times Article

Facebook posted a blog post this morning in which it admitted giving access to users’ messages to Spotify, Netflix, Royal Bank of Canada and Dropbox, though it denies that its users didn’t know this was happening. “In the past day, we’ve been accused of disclosing people’s private messages to partners without their knowledge. That’s not true – and we wanted to provide more facts about our messaging partnerships.”

The company says that it provided access to these third parties so its users could use messages to do things such as share movies (Netflix), music (Spotify) and photos (Dropbox) with friends, as well as send payment receipts from Royal Bank of Canada. Users could log into Messenger directly from these services so they didn’t have to leave these sites to send Facebook Messages.

“We worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends — but only if they chose to use Facebook Login. These experiences are common in our industry — think of being able to have Alexa read your email aloud or to read your email on Apple’s Mail app.”

Learn more at => Now You Can Ask Alexa to Read Your Email Messages Aloud

Facebook went on to explain:

Specifically, we made it possible for people to message their friends what music they were listening to in Spotify or watching on Netflix directly from the Spotify or Netflix apps (see screen shots below), to message links to Dropbox folders (like a collection of photographs) from the Dropbox app, and to message receipts from money transfers through the Royal Bank of Canada app.

In order for you to write a message to a Facebook friend from within Spotify, for instance, we needed to give Spotify “write access.” For you to be able to read messages back, we needed Spotify to have “read access.” “Delete access” meant that if you deleted a message from within Spotify, it would also delete from Facebook. No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct.”

In other words, other companies having the ability to read, write and delete your Facebook messages is a feature, not a bug.

Netflix told Business Insider that it never accessed anyone’s Facebook Messages:

“Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social,” a spokeswoman said. “One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so.”

Even so, it’s far from clear that Facebook users understood that by logging into Messenger from these third-parties that access was being given to their Facebook messages.

Check out => Why You NEVER Should Use Facebook to Log Into Another Website. Ever.

Facebook No Longer Lets You Hide Your Location

After reading the ways Facebook is sharing your messages and data with other companies, you may be thinking you should head to your privacy settings and adjust them by doing things such as turning off your location.

Not so fast.

It turns out, Facebook isn’t going to let you hide your location any more. You can still turn off location tracking in privacy settings and on your phone, but Facebook will still track your location even if you’ve turned off location tracking.

See => How to Know Which Apps Are Tracking Your Location

Gizmodo published an article earlier this week explaining that even if you turn off location tracking on your phone and in privacy settings in Facebook, the company will use your IP address to determine your location. The company will use that location information to show you location-based advertising.

Gizmodo, Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn’t Stop It From Tracking Your Location

In its response to Gizmodo, Facebook stated, “There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely. We use city and zip level location which we collect from IP addresses and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile to ensure we are providing people with a good service—from ensuring they see Facebook in the right language, to making sure that they are shown nearby events and ads for businesses that are local to them.”

Your Thoughts

Are you concerned about Facebook’s sharing access to messages with third parties? Are you troubled by Facebook tracking your location without you being able to opt out of being tracked? Do you wonder what we’ll learn next about Facebook?

Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.