Facebook allegedly harvesting hundreds of millions of phone numbers through its Android app
Today we released a new version of Norton Mobile Security for Android devices that contains our new Norton Mobile Insight technology. Mobile Insight has analyzed over 4 million Android applications and processes tens of thousands of new applications every day.
Mobile Insight automatically flagged the Facebook application for Android because it leaked the device phone number. The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers. You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.
According to Google Play, hundreds of millions of devices have installed the Facebook application and a significant portion of those devices are likely affected.
One thing that was revealed during this recent update is that the official Facebook application actually sends the users phone number back to Facebook’s servers without the users consent. This means that if you downloaded the official Facebook application for your Android phone, your phone number was sent to Facebook, and in some cases it may have even been published to your friends list.
Facebook claims that they have deleted these numbers, but according to the report, the problem has yet to be fixed.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/norton-mobile-insight-discovers-facebook-privacy-leak