All Your Contacts Are Belong To Facebook
August 13, 2011
If you've been using the iOS Facebook app, prepare yourself to have a very creepy surprise. As we're learning today, Facebook has been somewhat discreetly taking advantage of users who use the sync feature of their app to upload your address book to Facebook.
Yes, that great sync option Facebook introduced with its app that allows you to enhance your address book with birthday information and pictures was actually a two way thing. While the contacts matched did get the extra information, the rest of your contacts were cloned, and sent to Facebook.
Thankfully, Facebook doesn't seem to be doing anything with this data yet (or are they?), and they claim it's only visible to you. Of course, Facebook isn't really stealing your data. If you read all of their privacy statements and terms of use, that you agreed to, you would probably know about it. Yet, it's still really creepy to see all these contacts and numbers you thought were only on your phone appear on Facebook. I don't think I need to go into the many privacy and security concerns this raises, especially if you think of all the people who keep codes and credit card numbers in their contact list.
Either way, there might be some relief as Facebook does offer an option to erase that data:
Of course, we don't have any way to confirm that Facebook really does erase it. After all, all your data belongs to them now. Knowing how much criticism they're getting over privacy lately, it's probably in their best interest to remove it, so lets hope they do. Thoughts? Feelings? (via BGR)
- In the iOS Facebook app - turn off all the syncing options.
- Log into Facebook.com, hit account in the top right corner, then edit friends.
- Now hit the contact tab on the upper left to access everything synced from your address book.
- Hit the "this page" link in the text on the right.
- Select remove.
