Facebook Again Planning to Share Personal Information With Third Parties

Facebook is again looking to allow third parties to access users’ personal information like phone numbers, e-mail addresses and actual addresses, The Guardian reports.

Facebook announced its intentions to share the information in January. In a blog post, Facebook’s Jeff Bowen wrote:

We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object. Because this is sensitive information, we have created the new user_address and user_mobile_phone permissions. These permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permissions dialogs. Please note that these permissions only provide access to a user’s address and mobile phone number, not their friend’s addresses or mobile phone numbers.

But Facebook put their plans on hold after receiving vast criticism from a variety of privacy advocates, including U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas). Facebook’s Vice President of Global Public Policy, Marne Levine, responded to Markey’s criticism in a rather long letter that Markey posted on his site. Within the letter, Levine states:

After a user authorizes an application to access information from Facebook, the application is subject to technical limitations that prevent it from gaining access to any information beyond that which the user has authorized, and…it must comply with strict enforceable terms that limit use of the information it obtains, including outright prohibitions on the sale of user data and/or the direct or indirect transfer of user data to advertising networks or data brokers.

Levine’s letter also said that while Facebook temporarily suspended the feature, they are still deciding how to deploy it in a satisfactory manner to users, including “actively considering whether to enable applications to request contact information from [users under the age of 13] at all.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian reported that Facebook “reiterated its plan to go ahead with opening up users’ personal details.”

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