Facebook Defends Itself Against New York Times Privacy Report

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 1:31PM EST · Published Dec 19, 5:35AM EST

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Facebook Defends Itself Against New York Times Privacy Report — © Derzsi Elekes Andor / Wikimedia Commons

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) defended itself against an accusation printed by The New York Times, claiming the social network released private data to other large tech companies without the knowledge of the users. Facebook responded to the report.

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The Facebook defense is titled “Let’s Clear Up a Few Things About Facebook’s Partners” and is authored by Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Director of Developer Platforms and Programs. It says in part:

Today, we’re facing questions about whether Facebook gave large tech companies access to people’s information and, if so, why we did this.

To put it simply, this work was about helping people do two things. First, people could access their Facebook accounts or specific Facebook features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple, Amazon, Blackberry and Yahoo. These are known as integration partners. Second, people could have more social experiences – like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends – on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora and Spotify.

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To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.

How did people use these features?

People used these features in many different ways, including through:

Apps that allowed people to access their Facebook account on their Windows Phone device

Notifications about their activity on Facebook that they could turn on while they were using Safari or other browsers
“Social hubs” that consolidated their feeds across Facebook, Twitter, and other services

Messaging integrations that allowed people to recommend things like songs from Spotify to friends

Search results in Bing and elsewhere based on public information their friends shared

Tools that helped them find friends on Facebook by uploading their contacts from email providers like Yahoo

Oddly, the post was not from Facebook’s two leaders, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg or longtime chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, which begs the question why they did not defend the company themselves.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.