Facebook is under public scrutiny once again after recent reports have revealed that the social lmedia giant has harvested email contacts from 1.5 million users without proper consent.
In a report from Business Insider, Facebook has been asking for new users since May 2016 to input their password as a requirement when signing up for new accounts as a way to verify their identities. This was widely condemned by security experts.
The following screenshots show that once an individual enters their email password, a pop-up message would show that the social networking platform will ‘import’ the new user’s contact list from their email addresses without asking for proper permission:
This was first noticed by a ‘e-sushi’, a pseudononymous security researcher, upon noticing that Facebook was asking some new users to enter their email passwords to sign up for the platform. While matters weren’t clear at first, Facebook revealed to Business Insider that this was the method done to around 1.5 million accounts whose contacts were collected in such a manner and was directly inputted into Facebook’s systems as one of the ways to build Facebook’s social connections to recommend friends to add, as well as to improve ad targeting.
Immediate action
Since the issue came to light, the social media giant now has plans to inform users over the coming days of their plans to delete the uploaded contacts from the company’s database.
“Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people’s email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we’re deleting them. We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their settings.”
