Facebook Reveals 52 Companies With Whom it Shared Data

Facebook has said that it shared user data with 52 companies, including Chinese firms, weeks after it was reported that the social media giant formed data-sharing partnerships with cellphone makers giving them access to details of users and even their friends.
The social media giant's acknowledgement came as a part of a more than 700-page document dump to the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday evening. The committee released the information publicly on Saturday, The Hill reported.

Facebook yesterday revealed the partnerships shedding new light on its behaviour related to customer data in the wake of a scandal involving the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica where data of up to 87 million people was improperly shared, it said.
The list featured major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry and Samsung. Other firms featured on the list include Alibaba, Qualcomm and Pantech. But the list also includes four Chinese firms that US intelligence has flagged as national security threats Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.

Facebook said it shared data with the companies in an effort to improve its integrations and user experience across platforms and devices, noting that its partnerships were established before smartphones running on Apple's and Google's high-powered operating systems were as ubiquitous as they are now, the report said.
"People went online using a wide variety of text-only phones, feature phones, and early smartphones with varying capabilities," Facebook wrote.

"In that environment, the demand for internet services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube outpaced our industry's ability to build versions of our services that worked on every phone and operating system."
Facebook said it has ended 38 of its 52 partnerships and will shut down those remaining by July.

It said in documents that its initial omission of the partnerships resulted because it had shifted its focus to data shared between apps created on its developer platform the product area which had been implicated by Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook's sharing of user data with developers appears to have been less controlled than its data sharing with comparatively well-known device-makers and software companies.
Still, lawmakers have voiced concern about the company's data sharing agreements with Chinese firms.
The documents offer a follow-up to questions asked by lawmakers during and after the testimony.

"After initial review, I am concerned that Facebook's responses raise more questions than they answer," House Energy and Commerce's top Democrat Representative Frank Pallone has said.
Last month, The New York Times reported that Facebook, which was founded in 2004, has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung over the last decade.

Below is the full list of 52 companies Facebook has now provided to US lawmakers — though it admits the list might not actually be comprehensive, writing: “It is possible we have not been able to identify some integrations, particularly those made during the early days of our company when our records were not centralized. It is also possible that early records may have been deleted from our system”.

The listed companies are also by no means just device makers — including also the likes of mobile carriers, software makers, security firms, even the chip designer Qualcomm. So it’s an illustrative glimpse of quite how much work Facebook did to embed into services across the mobile web — predicated upon being able to provide so many third party businesses with user data.

Company names below that are appended with * denote partnerships that Facebook says it is “still in the process of ending” (it notes three exceptions: Tobii, Apple and Amazon, which it says will continue beyond October 2018), while ** denotes data partnerships that will continue but without access to friends’ data.
1. Accedo
2. Acer
3. Airtel
4. Alcatel/TCL
5. Alibaba**
6. Amazon*
7. Apple*
8. AT&T
9. Blackberry
10. Dell
11. DNP
12. Docomo
13. Garmin
14. Gemalto*
15. HP/Palm
16. HTC
17. Huawei
18. INQ
19. Kodak
20. LG
21. MediaTek/ Mstar
22. Microsoft
23. Miyowa /Hape Esia
24. Motorola/Lenovo
25. Mozilla**
26. Myriad*
27. Nexian
28. Nokia*
29. Nuance
30. O2
31. Opentech ENG
32. Opera Software**
33. OPPO
34. Orange
35. Pantech
36. PocketNet
37. Qualcomm
38. Samsung*
39. Sony
40. Sprint
41. T-Mobile
42. TIM
43. Tobii*
44. U2topia*
45. Verisign
46. Verizon
47. Virgin Mobile
48. Vodafone*
49. Warner Bros
50. Western Digital
51. Yahoo*
52. Zing Mobile*

July 03, 2018