For years, Facebook gave some of the worlds largest technology companies more intrusive access to users personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.
They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.
Facebook allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages.
The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
Acknowledging that it had breached users trust, Facebook insisted that it had instituted stricter privacy protections long ago.
But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections.
In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations.
As with other businesses under consent agreements with the F.T.C., Facebook pays for and largely dictated the scope of its assessments, which are limited mostly to documenting that Facebook has conducted the internal privacy reviews it claims it had.
Original article