Facebook has now issued a statement defending the company’s practices of data sharing. This statement had to be given after the recent report which said that Facebook gave personal information to its partners. To be exact, the report claims that certain partners of Facebook had access to a range of personal information about users and their friends. This report was published by TheNewYorkTimes earlier today morning according to IST.

According to NYT, Facebook shares personal information of Facebook users and their friends to about 150 of their partners. Now, there are huge names in this list of partners which include Netflix and Spotify. Also, Amazon and Microsoft have been named in this list too.

This report is yet another controversy on Facebook’s behalf after a series of hacks and data breaches. You might remember that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zukerburg has already testified in the US as well as UK parliament. Now, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s head of developer platforms and programs has clarified the company’s stance regarding this.

He has stated that NewYorkTimes report was “about “integration partners” which enabled “social experiences – like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends – on other popular apps and websites.”

Also, Vice President of Product Partnerships at Facebook shared a blog post detailing the exact data sharing policies. He added that Facebook “did not disclose private messages of users to its partners without their consent”.

On the question of giving read, write and delete access to its partners, Facebook’s VP for Product Partnerships told that “Write access” because without that users could not send messages to their friends. “Read access” was necessary for these apps so that the user could read the messages back and “Delete access” was given so that if users deleted a message from Spotify then it would be removed from Facebook also.

This means that Facebook is not denying giving access to its partners for reading personal information of Facebook users. The company states that “we’ve been public about these features and partnerships over the years because we wanted people to actually use them.” But he also added that most of those features are now gone so users need not worry about them.

Via – Livemint