Since Cambridge Analytica and its involvement in the Russian meddling in the U.S. Presidential Election, Facebook has been inside the crosshair of many.
This time, another scandal was discovered, involving Facebook in uploading the complete address books of 1.5 million new users without their consent. Facebook said these new users’ contacts were “unintentionally uploaded” since May 2016.
The mistaken happened because before 2016, the social media giant offered an option for newly registered users to verify their email account and upload all their contacts from that email account at the same time. The reason for this was to enable Facebook to suggest friend recommendations based on their contacts.
However, in May 2016, Facebook changed this feature, and disabled automatic contact upload. The social media also removed the text stating that users' contacts would be automatically uploaded at the same time they give access to their email account for verification.
The problem here, Facebook's automatic contact uploaded wasn't removed, as Facebook only removed the text telling people about the automatic contact uploads.
As a result, 1.5 million new Facebook users had their contacts uploaded without their knowledge or consent.
According to Facebook’s statement:
"When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people’s email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account. We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may have been uploaded."
"These contacts were not shared with anyone and we’re deleting them. We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their settings."
The incident is another that troubles Facebook, which has more than 2 billion users around the world.
Besides the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company also experienced one of the biggest security breach in its history, when 50 million Facebook users' personal data were leaked.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to criticism by promising to introduce more privacy-focused measures on the platform, but still, the company continued to experience controversies after controversies, including its inability to quickly remove the live-streamed Christchurch shootings that killed 50 people.
In the case of Facebook uploading users' contacts without their knowledge, Facebook said that all those users would be notified, and all their contacts Facebook has its hands on without users' consent would be deleted.
