Facebook is in the spotlight again and for all the wrong reasons.
There’s been a privacy issue that hit the tech giant, and Facebook has admitted that it collected up to1.5 million users’ email contacts without their knowledge.
Email contact lists uploaded unintentionally
CNN Business reported that Facebook said yesterday that the email contact lists had been accidentally uploaded to Facebook after a design change almost two years ago.
They also made sure to highlight the fact that they are in the process of deleting these contacts.
Facebook revealed that this issue began three years ago when it had made some changes to the step-by-step verification process that users have to go through when they decide to sign up for an account on the famous platform.
Before these changes, users were able to upload the email contact lists when they were opening a new account just so that they would find their friends who were already on the social media platform easier.
But it seems that in May 2016, Facebook removed the statements that were explaining users the fact that their contact lists would be uploaded to the company’s servers.
In other words, this meant that in some cases, users’ email contacts lists had been uploaded on the servers without these users giving their consent for this action.
Facebook says they just found out about the issue
CNN reported that a Facebook rep said yesterday that the firm did not realize this was happening until this month, “when it stopped offering email password verification as an option for people signing up to Facebook for the first time,” says CNN.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
