Facebook Gave Some Companies Special Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends

Facebook struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social-media giant has said it cut off all developers from that information, according to court documents.  The unreported agreements, known internally as “whitelists,” also allowed certain companies to access additional information about a user’s Facebook friends. That included information like phone numbers and a metric called “friend link” that measured the degree of closeness between users and others in their network, apparently. The whitelist deals were struck with companies including Royal Bank of Canada and Nissan Motor Co. , who advertised on Facebook. They show that Facebook gave special data access to a broader universe of companies than was previously disclosed. They also raise further questions about who has access to the data of billions of Facebook users and why they had access, at a time when Congress is demanding the company be held accountable for the flow of that data.Many of these customized deals were separate from Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers, which it recently disclosed.