Facebook Gave Special Data Access to 52 Companies including Chinese Firms

On Friday, Facebook have released a 747 pages of documents to Congress, which states that Facebook had gave dozens of companies special access to users data. Earlier they have said on their report that they have stopped all these users data sharing on 2015 only, but here its again.

Not only this Facebook also said on the report that it shared users data with 52 companies including  Chinese firms. All these information came up on Saturday, after social media giant, Facebook had submitted the document to the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday evening.

On documents Facebook said that the special deals wee required to give app developers time to become complaint with changes in its policies, and to enable device and software maker to create version of the social network for their products.

Moreover, Company also revealed it was still sharing the information of the user's friends such as name, gender, date-of-birth, current city or home town photos and page likes with 61 app developers. These 61 firms which are ranged from the dating app Hinge to shipment firm United Parcel Service Inc, were given an extension of Six months to come into compliance with the 2015 policy.

Share information with Top Tech Giants also
Facebook also revealed that it also shared its users data with 52 hardware and software makers, including big US companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry. It also shares data with some Chinese firms such as Huawei and Alibaba Group, Lenovo, TCL. Fourteen companies continue to have access to information about Facebook's users.

Facebook said it shared data with the companies in an effort to improve its integration and user experience across platforms and devices, noting that its partnerships were established before smartphones running on Apple's and Google's high-powered operating systems were as ubiquitous as they are now, the report said.

"People went online using a wide variety of text-only phones, feature phones, and early smartphones with varying capabilities," Facebook wrote.
"In that environment, the demand for internet services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube outpaced our industry's ability to build versions of our services that worked on every phone and operating system."- they added.

Facebook said it severed its data access to with 38 of the companies, and Seven companies will continue to have this access until July. There more companies including Apple, Amazon and accessibility app Tobii will have agreements with Facebook to continue to access this data beyond October.