Bob CollinsFacebook is denying that it has kept track of your text messages and phone calls without your knowledge if you use an Android phone.
Oh, they’ve done that, mind you. But Facebook is just saying they told you.
They did so, the company claims, when a graphic asked Android users whether they wanted to opt-in to the Messenger app’s ability to send SMS messages to contacts in your phone.
Seems simple enough, right?
It’s right there “upload … your call and text history.”
Nobody reads the Terms of Service, and few people apparently stopped to consider what the words in the graphic meant.
Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy.
— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) March 23, 2018
Here’s how to shut it all off:
- From the messenger addp, tap your profile picture in the top right corner.
- Scroll down and tap “people”
- Tape “sync contacts” and hit “OK” when it asks if you want to remove all
contacts and stop syncing.”
The company says doing so will delete all the phone data it harvested.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, the camera-shy Facebook CEO, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times apologizing for the Cambridge Analytica mining of subscriber information for the Trump campaign, acknowledging what is becoming a truism of Facebook: you can’t trust it.
In a new poll, fewer than half of Facebook’s users say they trust Facebook to abide by U.S. privacy laws. And another poll released today shows Facebook’s popularity has dropped 28 percent since last fall.
At the open today, Facebook stock got hammered again, dropping another nearly 3 percent after last week’s 14-percent drop. The FTC said it’s probing Facebook’s practices.
