Facebook Is Harvesting Your Android Phone Data Without Being Logged In
Facebook has had a rough start to 2018, with tens of millions of people’s data being harvested to losing $70 billion dollars in 10 days. Now, reports have surfaced that Facebook has been harvesting data from people’s phones who don’t even have an account on the platform. Many new android smartphone manufacturers are including Facebook as a system application on their phones – this means that you cannot delete it.
“We have partnered with mobile operators and device manufacturers to pre-install Facebook apps on Android devices to help people have the best experience on Facebook right out of the box and during the life of the device. By having Facebook apps pre-installed, we ensure people have the latest version of the application installed on their device, giving them access to bug fixes, critical security enhancements, and other new product features.” A spokesperson from Facebook said.
An owner of a Sprint LG handset came forward and said that the Facebook applications on his new smartphone have been transmitting data in the background to Facebook’s servers – and he’s never used the application nor has an account on the platform. Other individuals have also come forward, saying that they’ve tried multiple times to turn off background data and/or mobile data for the application, however within minutes the app has somehow turned the data back on. The app is also reinstalling updates that users have removed, without even asking for any permissions.
“Since these are system apps, they can’t be uninstalled. I can’t even disable many of them. When I uninstall updates on these apps and disable their access to use data in the background, within minutes they have all somehow turned their ability to use background data back on and have reinstalled all the updates that I manually uninstalled,” one user said.
Another anonymous user said: “I don’t have, and have never had, a Facebook account. But the behavior of these apps and the way they insist on using background data tells me that they are almost certainly collecting my data anyway.”
This comes as Facebook is given as a default application on phones, and as a result users cannot actually remove the app. That’s right, if you have a phone that came with Facebook pre-installed, you’re stuck with it – the only way to actually remove the app is through an arduous process. This process involves downloading software on your computer, putting this on a USB and completing an additional 13 steps, involving the input of various commands into the phone.
