Do you ever wonder how those Spotify suggestions come out of nowhere, recommending you your guilty pleasure, Blake Shelton? Or how Netflix recommends you, with startling accuracy, He's Just Not That Into You? According to a new investigation by The New York Times, Facebook has been looking over your shoulder at your private messages and giving them to all sorts of huge corporations.
As the times puts it, "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." It also "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, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier."Bing maintains that they deleted the data and, considering how bad and un-tailored the search engine is, they probably did.
This news comes in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg's appearance in front of the US government after Facebook was accused of misusing users' private data and not doing enough to combat what has become known as "fake news." Facebook is still denying any wrongdoing, telling The Hollywood Reporter that "at no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so."