The Facebook app for Android uses a feature called “Global Library Collector” to collect information related to the user’s system libraries and send it to the company’s servers.
Of course, this is not new, since the company has been “caught” collecting every bit of data from its users many times. The new thing in this case would be that it didn’t care about the data, in a parallel universe….maybe.
Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher from Hong Kong, discovered that Facebook’s Android app scans the phone, creates lists of the system libraries and uploads them to a server of the social network.
Jane says:
The Facebook app for Android scans the system libraries from its user's phone in the background and uploads them to their main computer. This is called the Global Collector Library on Facebook, also known as GLC in the app's code.
It periodically uploads the metadata of your system libraries to the company's server. There doesn't seem to be an opt-out option for Facebook Collector Global Library, nor does it seem possible to view what has been uploaded from our devices.
We don't know what the purpose of the GLC is, but I assume it can be used to determine system compatibility.
Facebook's app compresses each file before sending it to its servers to keep traffic to a minimum.
It is currently unclear what the purpose of this data collection is, what Facebook does with the data, and whether this data collection is covered or mentioned in its terms of service.
It may be a security measure, but who trusts Facebook?
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