Social Media Users Catch Facebook Gathering Their Call & Text Metadata

Dylan McKay tweeted the pretty chilling results of his “survey,” having explained that he wrote a script to download his Facebook data in a ZIP file, which revealed that his entire calls and text history was stored there. The record included all contacts on his phone, including those that he had already deleted, as well as the time and duration of every single call he had ever made.

Fellow users have been closely monitoring the thread on his feed; many have followed his lead checking their data and making sure that McKay was right.

Other netizens made an interesting observation, saying that Apple’s software, IOS, wasn’t affected unlike Android, which synchronizes a person’s Facebook friend-list with cellphone contacts by default.

Meanwhile, a Facebook spokesperson has stated that the contact list uploading was optional and could be dismissed if needed, suggesting users to disable it themselves.

Last week, it turned out that the personal information of about 50 million Facebook users had been obtained without their consent or permission by data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign, with an eye to creating a mechanism that would allow it to predict and influence voters’ behavior.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly apologized for the “breach of trust,” promising to make sure “this doesn’t happen again.”