Facebook wants to read your SMS, access confidential info: Kaspersky

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Update: 04:50PM, 04-Feb, 2014

Kaspersky Lab has now denied saying, "Kaspersky Lab would thus like to clarify their position and state that they are not holding Facebook responsible for this in any manner & are only commenting on the news that has already been published.”

More on this story here.

Original Story:

Security firm Kaspersky's recent report has stated that social networking site Facebook can and wants to access users confidential information as well personal text messages, via their Android mobile platform.

Kaspersky stated, "Over the last few days there has been a constant scrutiny over Facebook having access to your SMS. Buried within the latest update for Facebook's Android app is a feature that is causing growing concern among some users."

"Two-factor authentication provides an extra level of security, so it's good to see Facebook providing this option ... As a final note, we'd urge people to carefully check the permissions requested by any app when you first install it," Kaspersky Lab's Principal Security Researcher David Emm said.

At the time of installation, the Facebook app on Android mobile phones asks the user for some permissions to allow it to "Read your text messages (SMS or MMS)."

The social media site says "if you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message".

The security firm expressed apprehension on the word ‘automatic’ used in the permission sought by Facebook. “The key, it seems to lie in the word ‘automatically’. Surely the app doesn’t need to do this automatically. Facebook could simply prompt me to type in the code manually. Or, at the very least, provide this option,” Kaspersky said.

Facebook which celebrates its 10th anniversary today, declared its quarterly results last week. According to the reports, Facebook has had a substantial increase in its mobile user base and posted an increase of 39 percent over the year-ago quarter with nearly 945 million monthly active users on mobile. The social networking site reported that nearly 296 million monthly active users accessed the network from their mobile devices only.

Source: ET