Facebook and privacy

An article in smh.com.au, reports that Facebook Home for Android phones has been dubbed by technologists as the death of privacy and the start of a new wave of invasive tracking and advertising.

Given that Facebook (and others) already tracks people around the web and even buys data about their offline purchases, has the uproar come too late?

Home — which will be available as a download from Google's Play Store — is viewed as a Facebook takeover of Android and a significant threat to Google, as it puts Facebook's updates, contacts, messaging service, photos and soon, more invasive advertising, directly on to your phone's lock screen and home screen.

As quoted in The Verge:

“Facebook just put the entirety of the core Android experience inside a blue-tinted, ad-sponsored wrapper, and then hid the wrapper as an app inside Google's own store.”

Almost as soon as Home was announced some users worried that their calls, text messages, location and data from other apps would all be hoovered up. A lot of this data — including location, contacts and calls — Facebook already has access to if you use its existing Android app, while Facebook Messenger asks for permission to read your SMS and MMS.

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