Facebook doesn’t need to sell your data. It has been giving it away free for years.

That story, which was based on hundreds of documents reviewed by the Times, focused on Facebooks extensive data partnerships with some of the worlds largest tech companies, like Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft.

This story followed similar stories over the summer from the Times and the Wall Street Journal that found Facebook has long given partners special access to user data as a way to expand Facebooks reach into other services online.

All in all, it sounds like virtually everyone on the internet had access to some kind of Facebook data which likely means some of your data over the past eight years.

Facebooks partners stopped integrating this data with their services, but Facebook never shut off the Instant Personalization APIs, the software that allows companies to actually pull the data from Facebooks servers.

Another major problem, perhaps the most troubling, is that most Facebook users had no idea these partnerships exist, and Facebook may not even know the scope of how your personal data is used considering how many other companies have access to it.

If you want to share what youre listening to with your Facebook friends from Spotify, the company needs access to your private messages to enable that.

But can Facebook say with total confidence that all partners who may have had this kind of access or access to your friends list or access to your email and phone number never abused that data?

Zuckerbergs vision for an internet where Facebook was ubiquitous had serious privacy trade-offs that the company didnt understand at the time and still doesnt seem to fully understand.

Original article