Facebook was tracking your calls and texts says Android phone users

Facebook's reach into its users' data just seems to keep growing.

While the company deals with the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal—and the many privacy concerns it has raised—people have been digging into their downloadable data archives on the network to get a sense of exactly how much it knows about them. Several have taken to Twitter with the finding that Facebook has records of their calls and messages.

Following up on those tweets, tech news site Ars Technica found that Facebook has been quietly tracking calls and textson Android phones for years.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mumpic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

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

When you download Facebook's app, it asks for access to your phone contacts, which it uses for its friend-recommendation algorithm. It now makes clear that it wants access to call logs and SMS logs as well, but in the past, Android users may have given Facebook access to this data unknowingly, as a result of the way Android dealt with asking permission for call logs.

Before Android 4.1 (a.k.a. Jelly Bean), which was released in 2012, when an Android user gave Facebook access to phone contacts, Facebook also got access to actual call and text data by default.

The permissions in the Android API were subsequently changed, but according to Ars Technica, developers could get around the change if they wrote apps to previous versions of the API. In October 2017, Google finally deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API.

(iPhone users, rest easy. Apple has never allowed silent access to call data.)

In an email to the site, a Facebook spokesperson explained, "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts." We have reached out to Facebook directly for comment and additional information and will update this post with any reply.

It's not clear at this stage just how long Facebook was collecting this data, or exactly how it used it. The answers may not comfort those who already feel the network isn't handling their private information as carefully as it should.

It may not much matter. Facebook has so many users and is so deeply ingrained in people's lives that it could simply be too big to fail at this stage, not to mention that many haven't trusted Facebook for years, but still continue to use it.