Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook can now read your texts

tony.calileo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 226 posts

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#11

Post by mmvvaa »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #2

At this point I'm running at least 2 versions behind on the facebook app. I didn't install it last time it asked me to allow it to "Send emails to guests [of events] without host's knowledge" among other things. I see now that they also want to be able to connect and disconnect from WiFi. The Facebook app is probably the fastest way to find a list of all permissions in the Android system. "Draw over other apps", "Rea…

I just deleted mine from your comment. Thank you.

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#15

Post by jblz »

jblz wrote: post #9

"Read your text messages (SMS or MMS) If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message." That's a pretty crap feature to use to justify this. https://www.facebook.com/help/210676372433246

Looks like Twitter is doing something similar. One of the commenters here shows some decompiled code:

http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/57726/twitter-rec...

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#16

Post by kunjanshah »

The best way to prevent this in this app, and many other apps is to use "App Ops" in 4.4 or use CyanogenMod and enable privacy guard and then you can long press on the app and prevent the app from reading SMS and many other things while you are at it.

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#17

Post by anaphor »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #2

At this point I'm running at least 2 versions behind on the facebook app. I didn't install it last time it asked me to allow it to "Send emails to guests [of events] without host's knowledge" among other things. I see now that they also want to be able to connect and disconnect from WiFi. The Facebook app is probably the fastest way to find a list of all permissions in the Android system. "Draw over other apps", "Rea…

"view Wi-Fi connections". Hmm, is there a reason it also needs the geolocation permission and that? Are they gathering their own geolocation data bootstrapped from google's somehow?

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#18

Post by rodrodrod »

This has been a thing for about a month and a bit now. A Facebook engineer posted the following on Reddit[0], explaining the rationale behind the SMS permission:

> As for the READ_SMS permission, we require that so we can automatically intercept login approvals SMS messages for people that have turned 2-factor authentication for their accounts, or for phone confirmation messages when you add a phone number to your Facebook account. Unfortunately, the Androids permissions system does not allow us to specify that we would like to be able to read only SMS messages from a specific number (plus that wouldn't scale well because the list of numbers varies per country, but that's a separate issue).

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1t5z45/facebook_why_the...

Re: Facebook can now read your texts

#19

Post by beedogs »

zobzu wrote: post #10
simonsarris wrote: post #3

Is there any recourse short of "don't use the app" that regular users have against this sort of thing? Is there no meaningful way to push back against Facebook for demanding this permission?

use cyanogenmod + privacy mode, you can disable what the app can do. for example, you can disable that. app still works, it just gets an empty sms list.

Sure would be nice if someone would jailbreak the iPhone, so we could have these sorts of options in our little walled-gardens too.
Post reply on HN