Facebook has denied that its smartphone software actually reads users’ text messages – while it can do it, it doesn’t do it. Oh no.
The latest web privacy storm broke at the weekend when The Sunday Times carried a report which claims that the internet giant admitted reading the text messages of users who had downloaded the Facebook app.
So that means you, me and almost everyone else.
A slightly less than completely convincing riposte was subsequently published on the Business Insider website, which quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying “There is no reading of user text messages. On the Android App store, the Facebook app permissions include ‘SMS read/write’.
“The reason it is on there is because we have done some testing (not with the general public) of products that require the SMS part of the phone to talk to the Facebook App. That’s what the read&write refers to – the line of communication needed to integrate the two things.
“Lots of communications apps use these permissions … The Sunday Times is completely wrong when it says Facebook is reading people’s SMS. Wrong on the terminology, and wrong on the suggestion that it has been implemented.”
