This may have popped into your Facebook feed Wednesday:
Friends! “ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now PUBLISHED on Facebook! Go to the top right of the screen, click on Account, then click on Edit Friends, go left on the screen and click on Contacts. Then go to the right hand side and click on “visit page” to remove this display option. Please repost this on your Status, so your friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse if they do not want them published.”
Facebook’s action is not nearly as nefarious as it seems. It’s another example of Facebook engineers communicating like, well, engineers.
Here’s the deal:
If you recently installed the Facebook mobile app onto your smartphone, you had the option to sync your phone contacts with Facebook. For most people, the main payoff was that friends’ Facebook profile pictures would appear onscreen when they called.
Security & Privacy
Keeping tabs on online threats.
But what you were doing was allowing Facebook to keep tabs on your phone’s contact list (you got a pop-up box basically telling you that). That’s how Facebook is able to determine that the Sam Grobart in your phone is the same Sam Grobart you are friends with on Facebook.
So Facebook has the content of our phone’s contact list. And that’s because we let it.
At the same time, Facebook users have the option to display their phone number on their Facebook profile page. But you can restrict who sees your phone number, including the option that no one can see your phone number.
So if you’re Facebook, you think like engineers, and this is where Facebook often gets into trouble — not because they necessarily did a bad thing, but because they didn’t explain themselves well enough. What Facebook could have said is this: “We have these phone numbers from Sam’s phone, and we have phone numbers from Sam’s Facebook friends who have allowed Sam to see them. Having two lists is inefficient; wouldn’t Sam like it if we merged them into one list?” (If you are logged into Facebook you can see the list here.)
And so, the data is aggregated. Commingled. That’s why you see phone numbers on this list from people whose numbers you never had in your phone: because they put their numbers on Facebook and allowed you to see them. You could always have seen their phone number by going to their profile — all Facebook has done is moved them all into one list.
It is a list, it should be mentioned, that is visible only to you. No one else can see your list. It is not “published” in the way people mean when they mean something has been made available for public consumption.
Meredith Chin, a spokeswoman for Facebook, explained that this feature was neither new nor altered. “We’ve had this for quite some time,” she said. Facebook issued a statement on its site that reads: “Rumors claiming that your phone contacts are visible to everyone on Facebook are false. Our Contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time. The phone numbers listed there were either added directly to Facebook and shared with you by your friends, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook. Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers.”
Facebook is doing a couple of things by merging contacts: it’s trying to provide a convenience to users (“Hey look! We pulled all these phone numbers together for you in one place!”) and in doing that, it’s clearly trying to become the center of all your communication needs (see: the new Facebook Messenger app, introduced Tuesday). By collecting all this information, Facebook is most likely hoping it can take over spaces currently occupied by companies like AOL (via its AIM instant-message service), Skype, GroupMe and even telephone and e-mail providers.
Now, there is one thing Facebook is doing that some people might feel a little skeptical about: Facebook has the phone numbers of people who are not on Facebook. Let’s say you have a friend named George Washington. And let’s say that George is not on Facebook and wants nothing to do with Facebook. Well, if you’ve let Facebook sync up to your phone’s contact list, Facebook is going to have George’s first and last name (assuming that’s how you’ve entered him into your phone) and his phone number. George may not be all too pleased about that.
Why would Facebook hold onto that information? Well, if George should one day join Facebook, the site might know that you know him (either through phone data or an e-mail address, which you probably shared with Facebook when you first signed on and looked for friends via your, say, Gmail contacts) and it would then suggest you become Facebook friends. That’s why Facebook says “If you remove imported and synced contacts… Friend suggestions for you and your friends may become less relevant.”
So, in spite of the alarmist tone of the message circulating Facebook, this isn’t particularly alarming. The only thing — and this is not insignificant — is that you may not have been aware just how much information Facebook has on you. Seeing that contact list can be jarring — unnerving, even. You clicked an “O.K.” button some months ago to get some new feature and didn’t really think about it, but doing so allowed Facebook to pull in a not-insignificant amount and type of data about you and your friends.
Does having that information necessarily lead to Facebook doing something terrible with it? No. And some people (myself included) won’t really care about this. The way I see it, my data’s all over the place — so long as I am neither harassed nor stolen from, I’m going to live with it.
But your concerns may well differ, in which case you can follow the steps in the warning message and remove that feature.