EggXpert

Article:

Facebook admitted reading text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and said that it was accessing the data as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

Emma Draper, of the Privacy International campaign group, said, "Your personal information is a precious commodity, and companies will go to great lengths to get their hands on as much of it as possible."

There really is a difference between ignorance and stupidity.

What term would you use for people who continue to use a 

medium KNOWING they are being spied upon ?

It seems that reporters are jumping on the Android permissions manifest and declaring every possibility in it as fact.  On the other hand the Facebook app has far more permissions than it really needs.  Maybe a lazy development team that figured it is easy to take all the permissions and avoid a few extra minutes of debugging. lol

I really don't think a major company would put them selves at risk of serious class action lawsuit "as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service"

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MarkedOne:

Facebook, Google Chrome........ they are in the same bath.

How so? Links please!

Anyway, good thing I don't have anything private in my SMS inbox. I'm still uninstalling the app. The website loads faster from the browser anyway, at least on my phones it does...

jerm1027:

MarkedOne:

Facebook, Google Chrome........ they are in the same bath.

How so? Links please!

 

Anyway, good thing I don't have anything private in my SMS inbox. I'm still uninstalling the app. The website loads faster from the browser anyway, at least on my phones it does...

Lol, right when I read this I did the same thing.

"According to a YouGov poll for the newspaper, 70 per cent of smartphone users rarely or never read the terms and conditions policy when they download an app
."

Lol id say 99.95% dont.

Who seriously goes through 40 pages of terms and conditions.

Lucky ive deactivated facebook for a while now 

jerm1027:

I skim over them every once in a while, but I think the real issue isn't the reading, it's the deciphering of legal jargon. I'm certainly not going to higher a lawyer just to make the terms are ok for an app on smartphone...

I get tired while reading these things!

Seriously when are people going to learn not to download and install every app on their smart phones. Maybe I'm lucky because I have a company-supplied Blackberry Curve that's too slow to do much with.

The problem is companies come out with these apps and then clean up their goofs after the error or intention has been published.

John

I don't mean to advertise, however, if anyone is reading this and is worried, then I highly recommend a (FREE) Android app called TextSecure. I can't say for certain that it is out of the FB app's "scope," if you will. But what I do know is that if two people have TextSecure, their SMS messages can be encrypted using OTR*. What I also know is that many "spy" apps and "SMS backup" apps cannot monitor TextSecure messages (even unencrypted messages.) 

This app is free and should be available in the Play market, and the APK can be found online but I cannot vouch for the source if you get it from any shady site.  I encourage you to research similar apps if you are worried about mobile security. Any questions about anything please feel free to PM me.

 * - OTR is short for Off The Record. It's a plugin for many chat programs such as Adium for OSX, and Pidgin for Windows/Linux. It encrypts text conversations using a very efficient method which can detect Man-In-The-Middle attacks and other vulnerabilities. It's touted that the conversations also cannot be replicated even if someone were to have the key. I don't know the scientific details, but encourage you to research more if you are interested.

-Teddy

jerm1027:

MarkedOne:

Facebook, Google Chrome........ they are in the same bath.

How so? Links please!

 

Anyway, good thing I don't have anything private in my SMS inbox. I'm still uninstalling the app. The website loads faster from the browser anyway, at least on my phones it does...

Yea I need a link on Google Chrome as well, seeing as that's all I use haha. If it's true that's insane.