Facebook Mobile App?s Been Stealing Phone Numbers

Facebook has been inadvertently collecting phone numbers belonging to people who download the site?s Android application ? even if they aren?t members of the social network, don?t ever sign into the app or don?t explicitly share their cell phone number.

The bug was reported by a security software provider Wednesday and has been confirmed by Facebook, which noted the problem will be addressed in the forthcoming version of the app. A Facebook spokesman said the company believes the technical flaw was introduced in February of this year.

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?Inadvertently? my a$$. This ain?t the 1980s when you could get away with the lame excuse that ?the computer screwed up.? People are more tech savvy now.

Somebody wrote that into the Android App software and somebody created a file for the info on the Facebook server. This wasn?t an unanticipated bug, this was a deliberate feature.

Funnily, Facebook supposedly had no idea this was happening until the embarrassing revelation that this data had been stolen by hackers. Now they have to explain how they got all these phone numbers in the first place.

And Facebook wasn?t just harvesting phone numbers (without permission) to marry up with user names, they were stealing phone numbers of people who weren?t even Facebook users along with the names and numbers off the phone?s contact list. That?s some juicy metadata.

I?ll take it one step farther, I detect the rancid scent of the NSA at the bottom of Mr. Zuckerbird?s garbage can.

Giving Zuckerbird the undeserved benefit of the doubt, maybe it was the NSA who slipped that snippet of code into the Android App and configured the Facebook server to accept the incoming data and squirrel it away in a hidden file.

This is what can happen when you give the government direct access to your network.

Yesterday I saw a post advising Turkish dissents to use Twitter to communicate instead of Facebook. According to Turkish officials Facebook has been very cooperative in sharing information.

Twitter on the other hand has refused to cooperate and the Erdogan regime has declared them a menace to society.

High praise indeed from a tyrant.

Source: http://blurbrain.com/facebook-mobile-apps-been-stealing-phone-numbers/

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