Dylan McKay, A Facebook user from New Zealand analysed data from his archive that he had downloaded from the social networking site. He found out that Facebook has been collecting data regarding his phone calls and text messages over the last two years including the names of callers and duration of the calls.
In response to an email inquiry made by the ArsTechnica, The company’s representative told
“The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts.”
The representative also said that uploading the contact is optional and the installation of the application explicitly requests the permission to access contacts. Facebook also uses the phone contacts data for friend recommendations and in new versions of the Messenger app for Android and Facebook Lite devices, A more specific request is given to users for access to call logs and SMS logs on Android and Facebook Lite devices. But even if users didn’t give that permission to Messenger, they may have given it accidentally for years through Facebook’s mobile apps because of the way Android has managed permissions for obtaining call logs in the past.
Suppose if you have granted permission to read contacts during Facebook’s installation on Android’s previous versions specifically before Android 4.1 where the old permission can be used by Facebook to access to call and message logs by default. Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API, so Facebook API could continue to gain access to call and SMS data by specifying an earlier Android SDK version.
While Google has deprecated the version 4.0 of Android on October 2017, Facebook managed to collect the caller and text data up to that period, if you’re really concerned about privacy, you should not share your address book and call-log data with any mobile app.
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Source: ArsTechnica