Re: The manufacturer of my device denied all of this...
Extreme: that manufacturers, who mostly sell the kit wholesale to carriers, would do anything but put the app on the phone, if that. My admittedly semi-antique Samsung S3 (2013) has no FB app; my wife's S5 (2015 as I recall) has, but she never used it. Verizon tailored both, so it is not clear who installed any of the apps they came with. It is not obvious that the never-used FB application could connect to and collect data from FaceBook on its own, or just whose data that would be if it did, or that the data would be sent on to either Verizon or Samsung if it did so. Yet that is the semi-explicit claim of the NYT's rather alarmist "revelation."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
