Facebook app now reads your smartphone's text messages? THE TRUTH

  • 1 February 2014
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Facebook app now reads your smartphone's text messages? THE TRUTH

 

Blame Android, says social network

 
By John Leyden, 29th January 2014
 Facebook's updated Android app can read text messages on the user's smartphone.
 
The tweaked software now demands access to SMS and MMS messages, and the change was spotted yesterday by blogger Tony Calileo. "This is just one of a bunch of new permissions the app is requesting for this update, but it's probably the most alarming," Calileo wrote. The update is being gradually rolled out to punters.
 
 El Reg invited the social network to explain itself. A spokesman pointed us towards an explanation Facebook Android engineer Franci Penov posted in a discussion on Reddit. Penov said the app needed to read texts to implement automatic two-factor authentication: when a user logs in, a SMS is sent with an approval code; the app digs the text out of the user's inbox and uses it to complete the log in. He told Redditors:
As for the READ_SMS permission, we require that so we can automatically intercept login approvals SMS messages for people that have turned 2-factor authentication for their accounts, or for phone confirmation messages when you add a phone number to your Facebook account. Unfortunately, the Android permissions system does not allow us to specify that we would like to be able to read only SMS messages from a specific number.
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