Facebook and your Smartphone: Are they spying on you?

It seems like old times, the continued assault on privacy by internet interests or the government. Today, it is facebook which it looks like has Smartphone apps which potentially have the ability to send back all your SMS text messages or other data, like all your contacts, to Facebook.  What they would then do with the data is anyone’s guess, but the implications are pretty large.   There needs to be protections put into place to protect people’s right to privacy on their devices and electronic life. technology must be made to to have safeguards that all your calls, location and more are not just data to have for others.

Needless to say that technology can have its wonderful sides,  facebook helping friends keep in touch, entertain, get news and much more, but at the same time when members rely on it so much, there needs to be legal restrictions on what data gets pulled, or accessed by apps.  People ought to have better privacy safeguards.

Here are two great articles on the matter:

ARS TECHNICA, by Jon Brodkin

Facebook testing Android SMS integration, denies “spying” allegations.

Facebook is testing new mobile features for Android that integrate with the SMS functionality in smartphones, taking advantage of updated permissions allowing Facebook access to users’ text messages.

Facebook acknowledged the tests while responding to a Sunday Times article claiming that Facebook and other mobile apps are reading users’ text messages. The allegation itself isn’t all that groundbreaking—Facebook’s app for Android clearly lists the permissions users implicitly grant by installing the app, including the ability to edit and read text messages. (click on link to Ars Technica for full article)

This is another fantastic article on the subject, by J.D. Heyes of Natural News.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/035110_Facebook_spying_smartphones.html

(NaturalNews) As early as the late 1970s, there have been privacy concerns in the so-called “information age.” And why not? At every stage since the widespread acceptance and use of the computer, and especially the Internet, someone has been trying to invade your privacy.

The latest infringement comes from Facebook, and some other companies, which has resorted to spying on smartphone users’ personal text messages, according to a London Times investigation. Users who had downloaded the app for the world’s largest social network were subject to the infringement.