Facebook provided user data access to Airtel, Saavn among other firms

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. AFP Photo

NEW DELHI: Telecom major Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio's music app partner Saavn are among companies that could have had access to data of social media major Facebook, according to the submissions made by the US-based firm to the Congress. The company has named Airtel among firms having integration partnerships with Facebook. "Integration partners were not permitted to use data received through Facebook APIs for independent purposes unrelated to the approved integration without user consent," Facebook said in its submission. The integration partners of the company to build ways for Facebook users to receive Facebook or Facebook features on their device or network within platform use policies of the social media firm. According to the information shared by Facebook, its partnership with Airtel is no longer in force. When contacted Airtel spokesperson said, "The matter pertains to the year 2010 when Airtel was granted access to data by Facebook as an App developer. The project ended in 2013 and so did the access to the data. We confirm that the data was used only for our internal purposes. We take data privacy extremely seriously and follow a zero tolerance policy on the same." Facebook named Saavn music app, in which Reliance Jio has invested, among those that have access to user's friend data based on privacy setting of the friend or only after consent of the friend whose data is to be collected by the third party application. The US-based social media firm said that in April 2014, the company decided to tighten rules on its platform to prevent abuse. "At that time we made clear that existing apps would have a year to transition at which point they would be forced -- to migrate to the more restricted API and be subject to Facebook's new review and approval protocols. The vast majority of companies were required to make the changes by May 2015," Facebook said. Saavn's name figured among those companies who were given time till May 2015 to comply with rules. An e-mail query sent to Saavn elicited no immediate reply.