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Facebook planned to spy on Android phone users, internal emails reveal
This article is part of the CW Middle East issue of April-June 2019
Facebook project teams developed technology to allow the company to track the location of its customers from their mobile phones. Documents seen by Computer Weekly also reveal plans by Facebook to pass data on “single” Facebook users to companies selling dating services and organisations that wanted to target them with “political” advertisements. The documents, marked “confidential”, reveal a secret programme by Facebook’s “growth team” to collect and exploit data from customers with Android mobile phones. Their disclosure comes only a week after a critical report by a UK parliamentary committee investigating disinformation and fake news called for an independent regulator to oversee Facebook and other social media companies. The documents are a previously unpublished part of a cache seized when the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee dispatched Parliament’s serjeant-at-arms to arrest Ted Kramer, founder of Six4Three. Kramer was forced to hand over hundreds of legal documents disclosed in his company’s lawsuit with ...
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Facebook planned to spy on Android phone users, internal emails reveal
Facebook planned to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and to allow advertisers to send political advertising and invites to dating sites to ‘single’ people, confidential documents show