The company has named Airtel and Saavn among firms having partnerships to integrate “Facebook and Facebook features” onto their products.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio’s music app partner Saavn are among the Indian companies that could have had Facebook data access, according to the submissions made by the US-based social media network to the US Congress last week.
The company has named Airtel among firms having partnerships to integrate “Facebook and Facebook features” onto their products. However, according to information shared by the social media giant, its partnership with Airtel is no longer in force.
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In its submission, Facebook said, “Integration partners were not permitted to use data received through Facebook APIs for independent purposes unrelated to the approved integration without user consent.”
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When contacted, an Airtel spokesperson told PTI that the matter pertained to the year 2010 when Airtel was granted access to data by Facebook as an App developer.
“The project ended in 2013 and so did the access to the data. We confirm that the data was used only for our internal purposes. We take data privacy extremely seriously and follow a zero tolerance policy on the same,” said the company.
Facebook also named Saavn music app among those given access to data pertaining to users’ friends based on privacy setting of the friend or after consent of the friend whose data is to be collected by the third party application.
The Silicon Valley-based firm said it decided to tighten rules on its platform in April 2014 to prevent data access abuse.
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“At that time we made clear that existing apps would have a year to transition at which point they would be forced — to migrate to the more restricted API and be subject to Facebook’s new review and approval protocols. The vast majority of companies were required to make the changes by May 2015,” Facebook said.
Saavn’s name figured among those companies who were given time till May 2015 to comply with rules.
Saavn’s response in awaited.
(With agency inputs)
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