Facebook phone app attempts to seize ALL YOUR MAIL

Computer misuse

Does this not fall under the computer misuse act -- aka hacking ?

If this happens to phones in the UK does this mean that we get the chance to extradite Zuckerberg from the USA to stand trial ?

Wow. Their deception and contempt for their users really has no bounds does it?

I also had a carrier locked install of Facebook on my mobile. This was the sole reason that drove me to root my handset and destroy this work of evil. And my phone is running twice as good on a Custom ROM :-)

I wonder what line in their T&C's permit them to make changes to personal data on a personal mobile device that is completely unrelated to the FB App or FB service? Sounds like an offence under the Computer Misuse Act (or the US version) - unauthorised access to and modification of data. Even if this is allowed through their T&C's my next thought would be - unfair contract terms. What about damages for loss of this data, and who's going to re-populate the original email addresses?

OK we're not exactly short on examples, but yet again FB prove they treat their users with utter contempt. I'll give it a couple of weeks until FB say sorry, didn't mean to, and won’t happen again. Only so they can do something equally insidious 3 months later. And so the cycle repeats, as we have seen time and time again. It's time for FB to die. But even if millions of their users close their accounts to protest, welcome to problem number two. That deactivating an FB account doesn't delete any the data they have on you, so they can still carrry on profiting from selling your data (albeit perhaps anonymised).

FB is nothing but one of the biggest data scams in modern history. The thought process must have gone like this... "Hmmmm personal data is valuable. We can profit from this. But how do we get people to handover their sex, age, interests etc? I know, let's call it social networking, where under the rouse of staying in touch with friends, we'll get people to hand this stuff over to us freely"!

AND IT WORKED! 900 MILLION PEOPLE FELL FOR IT!

Does anyone know *definitively* if the FB app is doing this as a matter of course, or only when you resync contacts in the app? For example, I've noticed that it only updates profile photos when you sync contacts and even then there's the option to not over-write.

I do use Facebook

and event the android app, but I'd never ever sync my address book with facebook, my non facebook using friends would kill me for giving their mail and phonenumber to Zuckerberg.

Below is an FBI quote from today's El Reg article on the guy who hacked Scarlett Johanssons email:

"In most cases, Chaney accessed the administrative settings on the victims’ accounts so that all of their emails would automatically be forwarded to a separate email account that he controlled."

Is this not exactly what Zuckerberg has just done?

The prosecutors in that case are asking for 6 years in prison. It would have been more if he had shown any intention to make use of the information...

explains something...

I wonder if it does something similar on a pc, I installed FB as a mess-about one evening. Im pretty damned sure I told it to not look anywhere and a few visits later its popping up not only my family but old flames that I hadn't seen in over 10 years.

How the fook does it know this stuff?????

Calm down people

This is just Facebook's reply to last week's Google massive FAIL on Google+ Events launch that produced hundreds of spam messages.

Facebook just wanted the attention now. As we all know there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Big fail

Wooohooo, changing people's data behind there backs, now there's a way to piss people off!

In the UK the law says that a company must securely store data within the limits of the permissions given by the data owner, must correctly process the data and must ensure that the data is accurate. Changing recorded email addresses, especially in a database that distinctly isn't Facebook's (i.e. the address book on your phone) is breaking the law in several ways, all at once! Even if their T&Cs say they can that'd likely be judged to be an unreasonable condition.

Expect things to get worse than this foul up. Now that they've got angry shareholders to placate with profits and rising share price they're going to have to find every which way of extracting more data. Of course, the more they do this sort of thing the more likely it is that they'll lose members, just like MySpace did.

Phew!

My new Android phone arrives tomorrow, my first smartphone- glad I read this story when I did.

<exit smug mode>

Redirect facebook to 127.0.0.1

If you want to stop Facebook dead in its tracks - edit the hosts file (needs root access on linux or android, admin user on windows) and add lines like

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

(do this for all facebook web addresses that you want to block)

This will prevent any application on the device connecting to facebook.

Facebook suicide

I love the smell of napalm in the morning...