Thread by @kashhill

Facebook Was Fully Aware That Tracking Who People Call and Text Is Creepy But Did It Anyway
gizmodo.com/facebook-was-f…

It's really refreshing, if disturbing, to see Facebook employees talk candidly about how to do privacy-invasive things without freaking users out and causing a press backlash. Thank you for the bizarre happenings in the UK that led to the release of internal FB emails.

Good backgrounder on the strange series of events in UK that led to this techdirt.com/articles/20181…

I just can't stop thinking about how crazy this is. Why is there no one in the room at Facebook saying, "Hey, it's incredibly invasive to track who people are calling and texting so maybe they should get notified in both the Android permissions AND the Facebook fineprint."

The reason I'm so obsessed with People You May Know is that it's such a great example of the invasive lengths to which a company will go to track us for what is a mostly inane product feature.

I can't say for sure but I suspect that Facebook collecting call and text history is how this sex worker had her real identity exposed to clients, a story I wrote about last year. As I recall, she had an Android phone and had the Facebook app on it. gizmodo.com/how-facebook-o…

"Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again."

I asked Facebook at the time how this might have happened. Their response was essentially " ¯\_(ツ)_/¯." That would have been a nice time for them to mention they make friend recommendations based on who people call and text.

I was very disturbed by Facebook employees' internal discussion about using call and text history for making People You May Know recommendations so I dug in to find out more. Facebook says this isn't a feature and has only been "tested." gizmodo.com/how-facebook-s…