ESET explains what happened with Facebook

ESET, a leading company in proactive threat detection, explains the case of a Facebook user who discovered that the application he used to access the social network stored a record with the calls he made, SMS messages, between other data. Facebook for its part assured that the information collected was with the consent of the users and that it was used to improve their experience in the social network.

On March 21, Dylan McKay, a programmer from New Zealand, aroused the concern of many users after the publication of a tweet where he claimed to have discovered that Facebook had been keeping everything for at least a year. your outgoing and incoming call history, your SMS messages, phone numbers, contact names and call duration, and downloaded a copy of the information in a ZIP file.

ESET researchers observed that Facebook had effectively collected that information from Android users until October 2017, when it stopped doing so. However, it should be noted that this action happened because users by default gave Facebook access to their calls and messages by downloading the application and start using it.

On March 25, the social network said it did not collect data about calls or SMS messages without the user's permission. In this sense, he assures that "people must expressly agree to use this function". In addition, they point out that "if the user at some time wishes to stop using this function, he can unsubscribe in the configuration section and all the information collected, both of calls and messages, is eliminated".

"The ability to store the history of calls and messages is part of a functionality for those who used Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This option was intended to help the user to keep in touch with those people they wanted and to offer a better experience in the social network, "Facebook reported. Finally, in his statement Facebook ensures never having sold this information and also that this functionality does not collect the content of messages or calls.

On the other hand, the site Ars Technica ensures that in previous versions of Android, even before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), if the user gave permission to read contacts during the installation of Facebook on Android, also I was enabling Facebook to access the call and message log. Although Ars Technica considers that Facebook's statements are somewhat contradictory with the opinion of users with whom they communicated, it is still not possible to affirm or deny any of the testimonies.

"Users should be aware of the scope of their decisions when browsing the Internet or Social Networks; use an application on your Smartphone or Tablet, subscribe to a social network or use any other service on the network, as well as take enough time to find out what permissions to third parties are giving on your personal information. Given these last cases there is much talk of Facebook, but we can not lose sight of the many applications and services that use our information as users, the idea is not to become paranoid, instead you have to know what happens, how it works and make decisions based on that knowledge, "said the Head of the Laboratory