- #FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ZIP FILE#
- #FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ARCHIVE#
- #FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ANDROID#
He says he removed and reinistalled the app several times over the course of the next few years, but never explicitly gave the app permission to read his SMS records and call history.
#FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ANDROID#
Dylan McKay told Ars that he installed Messenger in 2015, but only allowed the app the permissions in the Android manifest that were required for installation. This contradicts the experience of several users who shared their data with Ars.
While we receive certain permissions from Android, uploading this information has always been opt-in only. If, at any time, they no longer wish to use this feature they can turn it off in settings, or here for Facebook Lite users, and all previously shared call and text history shared via that app is deleted. People have to expressly agree to use this feature. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provide you with a better experience across Facebook. In the response, a Facebook spokesperson stated:Ĭall and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. And you may want to examine the rest of what can be found in the downloadable Facebook archive, as it includes all the advertisers that Facebook has shared your contact information with, among other things.įacebook responded to reports that it collected phone and SMS data without users' knowledge in a "fact check" blog post on Sunday. However, two days after a request to delete all contact data, the contacts were still listed by the contact management tool.)Īs always, if you're really concerned about privacy, you should not share address book and call-log data with any mobile application.
#FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ARCHIVE#
( Update: The cached archive was generated once and not updated on the second request. After purging my contact data, my contacts and calls were still in the archive I downloaded the next day-likely because the archive was not regenerated for my new request. But as many as half of Android users worldwide remain on older versions of the operating system because of carrier restrictions on updates or other issues.Īpple iOS has never allowed access to call log data by third-party apps, overt or silently, so this sort of data acquisition was never possible.įacebook provides a way for users to purge collected contact data from their accounts, but it's not clear if this deletes just contacts or if it also purges call and SMS metadata. Starting with Marshmallow, users could toggle these permissions separately themselves. So Facebook and other applications could continue to gain access to call and SMS data with a single request by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. From Android 4.1 on, a single request from those applications would trigger two separate permission requests.īut until the "Marshmallow" version of Android, even with split permissions, all permissions could still be presented all at once, without users getting the option to decline them individually. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16.
If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook's installation on Android a few versions ago-specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)-that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us-my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 20, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.
Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum /CIRUguf4vD
#FACEBOOK DOWNLOAD MESSAGES ZIP FILE#
While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.ĭownloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. More on the Facebook response is appended to the end of the original article below. This "fact check" contradicts several details Ars found in analysis of Facebook data downloads and testimony from users who provided the data. The company also writes that it never sells the data and that users are in control of the data uploaded to Facebook. : Facebook has responded to this and other reports regarding the collection of call and SMS data with a blog post that denies Facebook collected call data surreptitiously.