Report States Facebook Allowed Spotify, Others To Read Private Facebook Messages And Access Other User Information

An investigation by the New York Times is stating that Facebook gave unauthorized access to personal user information to a number of companies. The report was compiled through reviewing over 270 pages of internal Facebook documents and interviews with 60 different individuals that included former Facebook employees, employees of Facebook partners, former government officials, and privacy advocates

Spotify, one of the companies cited in the NYT investigation, was reportedly able to view the private messages of over 70 million users each month. Netflix was also reportedly offered the same type of access to Facebook user messages. The investigation stated that access and privileges to Facebook user information for Spotify, Netflix, and other companies "appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show."

Other companies cited in the investigation include Pandora, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Sony, the Royal Bank of Canada, Rotten Tomatoes, and Microsoft, whose Bing search engine division was allowed to see the names of "virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent."

This news is yet another blow to the social media company, which has been under scrutiny in recent months for how it handles the privacy of user data.