Report: Facebook let major tech firms access private messages, friends lists

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On Tuesday evening, The New York Times revealed more startling news about Facebook: the company "gave some of the world's largest technology companies more intrusive access to users' personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules."

The news comes days after Facebook disclosed a massive photo bug, weeks after 50 million people were affected by an access-token harvesting attack, and less than a month after it was revealed that Facebook considered selling access to its users' data. And all of those scandals are in addition to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. In June 2018, Facebook dodged some lawmakers' questions in written testimony, after two days of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Senate.

The newspaper cited "hundreds of pages" of internal documents, which it did not publish.

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