Facebook 'stole' mobile numbers from Android phones, says Norton

In a new blog post,Norton anti-virus software maker Symantec said Facebook had automatically stored mobile phone numbers in its servers from Android smartphones without the consent of users.

The blog post said,

The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers. You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.

The Facebook app has been installed on nearly 500,000,000 devices if one were to look at the Google Play Store and according to Symantec a majority of these apps are likely to be affected.

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[caption id=“attachment_918857” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab of the Facebook Android app.[/caption]

The post also said that Facebook has promised Symantec that they will investigate the issue and provide a fix in their next Android update. According to Facebook, they did not use or process the phone numbers and have deleted them from their servers.

The bug once again exposes how Facebook tends to treat user data and privacy with contempt. Just last week, the company admitted that it had inadvertently exposed 6 million email ids and phone numbers to unauthorised viewers over the past year.

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Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide.