Facebook's data collection capabilities appear to be expanding to monitoring all phone calls on Android devices.
As the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to unfold, some Facebook are downloading their data from the social media platform and discovering something shocking: Detailed phone records, including dates, times, call durations, call recipients, and phone numbers!
This only happens to people using Android devices, and only when certain data permissions are granted. Take Dylan McKay, a New Zealand developer whose tweet depicting a screenshot of the harvested Facebook data went viral last week. A subsequent investigation by Ars Technica revealed the connection to Android.
When granted access, Facebook uses an Android phone's contact data. The company's Messenger app goes even further, seeking access to call logs and messages on corresponding devices. But that's not all.
As Ars discovered, in older versions, prior to Jelly Bean (v4.1), granting Facebook permission to access your phone's contacts also allowed the app to access call logs and messages. Later Android updates discreetly turned all of these into access permissions, but the change didn't affect Android apps that had already been granted permission.
In other words, if you were a long-time Android user and gave Facebook permission to access your contacts before the release of Android 4.1 — which came out in 2012 — the app was able to continue tracking your call and message data. As Ars notes, Google officially began advising developers not to use the Android 4.0 API anymore in October 2017.
As this news began to circulate on Sunday, Facebook published a “fact check” explaining how call and message history logging is enabled in Messenger and Facebook Lite on Android. It doesn’t address the fact that some older versions of the app were used to share data — which is clearly a Google issue — but it does describe how the two apps collect data and what they do with it.
But even with Facebook's explanation, the discovery comes at a time when all eyes are on the company's data collection practices. The social network has been facing advertiser withdrawals, federal investigations and widespread backlash since it was discovered that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica exploited developer resources to harvest the data of more than 50 million users in 2014.
