Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Splines 3008 days ago
I don't want to be a FB apologist (I uninstalled fb/messenger because of all this), but the text of the prompt seems relatively clear:

> Continuously upload info about your contacts like phone numbers and nicknames, and your call and text history. This lets friends find each other on Facebook and helps us create a better experience for everyone.

https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/opt-in_scre...

Granted, those six words are tacked on the end of a sentence, and given the intrusiveness of the feature should probably have been called out in its own opt-in dialog with its own switch. But it's not like they asked for contact access and turned around and used it for something else.

1 comments

That's from Facebook's response to the scandal, right?

Has that prompt always been there? A lot of people seem to be unaware that Facebook has been doing this, and I haven't seen anyone say they saw that prompt in 2015.

I searched Google for the text of that prompt, or any reference to Facebook accessing your SMS history, in 2014 to 2017, and didn't find anything.

The earlier prompt never mentioned anything about sms and call logs, just uploading contacts.