Facebook has collected the calling and texting history of users for years. Although people gave permission for this themselves, they are sometimes shocked that the social network knows so much about them.
This weekend, developer Dylan McKay downloaded his Facebook archive. In it you will find all the information that Facebook has about you. You can download the archive here by pressing 'download a copy of your Facebook data'.
In that archive, McKay saw who he had called and smiled with. Facebook also had access to his entire contact list, including telephone numbers of people he had already removed from his phone for a while.
Shocked??
Through McKay's tweets , Facebook users were encouraged to download their archive. They reacted shocked: Facebook has collected a huge amount of data about them, including their calling and texting history.
What appears to be: the users have given permission to collect this data. This happened during the installation of the Android app from Facebook's chat service Messenger. In it Facebook requests access to your contact book and your call and SMS history, as you can see in the screenshot on the right.
"Remove"
Facebook says it introduced the function a few years ago. Synchronizing this data should ensure that you 'find people with whom you want to connect more easily', writes the social network in a blog. "We never sell this data, and we do not collect the content of your text messages or phone calls."
You can disable the synchronization option in this way , so that all your contacts and associated phone information will no longer be synchronized with Facebook. Facebook promises that your call and SMS history will be erased from the platform. You can also delete any uploaded to Facebook by phone here pressing the button 'delete all'.
