The Facebook scandal

Joshua Topolsky, reporting for The Verge:

Today British paper The Sunday Times has written what appears at first glance to be a shocking discovery of abuses of privacy at Facebook. According to the article, Facebook "admitted to reading text messages" as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service. The story then goes on to conflate this alleged infraction with both anonymous and known "phone apps" that pilfer your data while you're not looking.

There's just one small problem: Facebook says the report is misleading at best.

[...]

We reached out to Facebook, and here's what a spokesperson had to say:

The Sunday Times has done some creative conspiracy theorizing but the suggestion that we're secretly reading people's texts is ridiculous. Instead, the permission is clearly disclosed on the app page in the Android marketplace and is in anticipation of new features that enable users to integrate Facebook features with their texts. However, other than some very limited testing, we haven't launched anything so we're not using the permission. If we do, it will be obvious to users what's happening. We'll keep you posted on our progress.