Facebook to Stop Using Phone Numbers for Recommending Friends

Social media giant Facebook volition soon cease using its users' phone numbers to recommend friends to them. The move comes post-obit the company'south $five billion settlement with the U.s.a. Federal Trade Commission before this twelvemonth, and volition come across the visitor cut back on practices that raised a number of privacy concerns around the visitor.

The company had started request for users' phone numbers in society to enable two-gene authentication (2FA) on their accounts to ensure higher security and for preventing hackers from gaining access to user accounts on the platform.

Yet, reports later revealed that the visitor was in fact using these phone numbers for purposes other than what it claimed. The company started using phone numbers to ability its "People You lot May Know" feature, where information technology encouraged people to add users on Facebook based on whether they had their phone numbers saved in their contacts. It besides used these phone numbers to target ads to its users, and according to some reports, user phone numbers were searchable past advertisers.

At present, according to a report from BBC, the company will stop using phone numbers for purposes other than 2FA on its platform. The change comes equally a part of the company's $v billion settlement with the United states of america Federal Trade Commission, and will come into effect from 2020.

Facebook's track record with user privacy and information protection has been terrible and has constantly been in the spotlight over the last couple of years, especially following the Cambridge Analytica scandal which proved, in many ways, to be a turning point for people losing trust in the company entirely. Since then, Zuckerberg and company accept been trying to gain back some of that trust although it doesn't seem like that will exist happening someday shortly.