Mark Zuckerberg’s idealistic vision for Facebook has come back to haunt the company.
Facebook hasn’t been selling your data, folks. Instead, it’s been giving it away free — and for a long time, that was part of the plan.
The New York Times published another long and damning investigation into the social giant’s data practices late Tuesday. That story, which was based on hundreds of documents reviewed by the Times, focused on Facebook’s extensive data partnerships with some of the world’s largest tech companies, like Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft.
“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 New York Times reported. “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.”