More Facebook commercial data sharing details emerge

Commercial data sharing partnerships continued after rules were tightened in 2015

Facebook has been sharing users' data with more companies than it had previously disclosed, including Chinese firms proscribed by the US authorities.

The latest disclosure was made by Facebook to the US House of Congress Energy and Commerce Committee in response to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's questioning by Congress in April after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. The Committee has made some of the information public.

A total of 52 technology companies are listed in the document as having had special access to users' data as they are "authorised to build versions of Facebook or Facebook features for their devices and products". They include US firms Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Qualcomm, South Korea's Samsung, Canada's BlackBerry, The UK's Virgin Mobile and most controversially China's Huawei, Lenovo, Alibaba, Oppo and TCL. Huawei in particular has been the focus of investigations in the US because of "Chinese espionage in general, and Huawei's role in that espionage in particular".

Huawei phones were recently banned from US military bases over concerns about backdoors.

Facebook says it stopped sharing users friends data with developers in 2015, but sharing of the data with commercial "partners" continued after this time.

A further 61 companies were given one-off extensions to existing data sharing agreements, including for friends data, after the rules were tightened up in 2015, including Nike, Nissan and Spotify.

The existence of some of these partnerships, including Huawei, had been reported previously but some are new. This fits a pattern of Facebook withholding information about its data sharing activity until forced to come clean.

By way of explanation, the social media firm said the data sharing arrangements were intended to ensure that Facebook app operated on a variety of platforms.

"People went online using a wide variety of text-only phones, feature phones, and early smartphones with varying capabilities," Facebook told the Committee, according to the WSJ.

"In that environment, the demand for internet services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube outpaced our industry's ability to build versions of our services that worked on every phone and operating system."

However, Democratic Representative Frank Pallone Jr, a member of the Committee, sounded a sceptical note.

"After initial review, I am concerned that Facebook's responses raise more questions than they answer," he said.

When information about the deal with Huawei originally emerged, Senator Mark Warner said: "The news that Facebook provided privileged access to Facebook's API to Chinese device makers like Huawei and TCL raises legitimate concerns, and I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers."

Last week the Facebook went on a PR offensive, launching a series of ads including one with the banner "Data misuse is not our friend", which has led to some pithy ripostes elsewhere on social media.

Here is the full list of technology companies listed by Facebook in the document as authorised to build versions of Facebook or Facebook features for their devices and products.

Accedo, Acer, Airtel, Alcatel/TCL, Alibaba**, Amazon*, Apple*, AT&T, Blackberry, Dell, DNP, Docomo, Garmin, Gemalto*, HP/Palm, HTC, Huawei, INQ, Kodak, LG, MediaTek/ Mstar, Microsoft, Miyowa /Hape Esia, Motorola/Lenovo, Mozilla**, Myriad*, Nexian, Nokia*, Nuance, O2, Opentech ENG, Opera Software**, OPPO, Orange, Pantech, PocketNet, Qualcomm, Samsung*, Sony , Sprint, T-Mobile, TIM, Tobii*, U2topia*, Verisign, Verizon, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone*, Warner Bros, Western Digital, Yahoo*, Zing Mobile*.

* denotes partnerships that we are still in the process of ending (with the exceptionof Tobii, Apple and Amazon, which will continue beyond October 2018). **denotes partnerships that will continue but integrations will not have access to friends' data. All other partnerships on the list have already been discontinued.