Did you freak out earlier because you saw your friends update their Facebook status to something along the lines of “your phone contacts are now visible to everyone of Facebook?” Well it’s ok… So did 50% of the Facebook community.
TechCrunch has reported that “Facebook has responded to a privacy scare meme likely deriving from a recent HackerNews thread called “Facebook has your complete phonebook” both with an official post on Facebook’s Wall and a personal message from a Facebook Messenger engineer Ben Gertzfield on HackerNews.”
Facebook’s official PR response to this was issued via Facebook and was stated as follows:
“Rumors claiming that your phone contacts are visible to everyone on Facebook are false. Our Contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time. The phone numbers listed there were either added by your friends themselves and made visible to you, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook. Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers.”
How did Facebook get ahold of all these phone numbers? Well you must have enabled contact synching on the Facebook mobile app. Is this still not making any sense and you believe Facebook is out to collect you and your friends private information? Well then look no further then the statement “HackerNews user ‘extension’ points out, enabling contact synching on the Facebook mobile apps will result in something similar to the following message:
“If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device (name, email address, phone number) will be sent to Facebook and be subject to Facebook’s Privacy Policy, and your friends’ profile photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information. [Cancel] [I Agree]“
So it truely looks like it your phone contacts were synched, it might have actually been your fault. It’s alright though, to remove all the phone numbers you’ve imported to Facebook Contacts click here.
SOURCE Facebook and TechCrunch
