Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been in the spotlight over the past week or so. It was the Cambridge Analytica situation that opened up the can of worms. Because of that, what we give Facebook permission to see has been the topic of discussion. Many users are surprised at their Facebook permission list and often don’t recall giving such approval.
TeamBlind set out to find out how many users actually gave Facebook permission to collect their call and text data. Here are their results from a sample size numbering just over 1300 Facebook users.
Last month, we learned the voter-profiling company, Cambridge Analytica, collected data of tens of millions of Facebook users. Shortly afterward, Android users discovered that their call and text history may have been collected by Facebook, which was allegedly scraping this data as far back as 2015.
We surveyed 1,300 Android users, asking them one simple question: Did you give Facebook consent to collect your call and text history? The survey ran from April 1, 2018 through April 6, 2018 and 89% responded with ‘No.’
At TeamBlind, we’re on a mission to flatten the hierarchy and bring transparency to the workplace. Transparency results in voice and voice results in change; often for the better. That’s why we created ‘Blind’, an anonymous social app and online community for tech employees.
It is important to note that surveys aren’t always 100% accurate, especially with a relatively small sample size of 1300 respondents, but they do help form a hypothesis of the broader picture. It would be interesting to see another survey posing the same question to a larger group to see if the results would be similar. So take this survey as you will and at face value.
What do you think of this survey? Do you remember giving Facebook permission to harvest your text and call data? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
