If Facebook’s controversial emotion manipulation study didn’t have you up in arms about the site’s privacy practices, then perhaps concerns surrounding the social network’s Messenger app might.
In April, Facebook announced it would kill off the chat feature in all of it’s mobile devices. Instead, it would require users to download Facebook Messenger (which is a separate app) in order to chat with friends. Now Facebook argued that the reason for this move is to make the process of sending messages faster and to provide much needed new features: like adding new ways to send photos and videos, have group conversations, conduct free voice calls, leave voice-based messages, and post animated stickers. One would agree, all great features that everyone can avail of.
Other than the inconvenience of having to use a separate app to chat with your friends, it seems to have users very concerned about their privacy because of how the app demands so many (in my opinion) unnecessary permissions from your device. So in order to use this Messenger app you have to approve and give it full access to many of the phones features. For instance you will have to allow it to make regular phone calls, search through all of your accounts, access and control all of your text messages, take pictures and videos, record audio, download files, and change your network connectivity all without notifying you. So, as you can see this has led many people complaining the app violates their privacy.
Facebook’s reasoning behind wanting so much access is to make the social media experience better for the user.
Fortunately, if you want to avoid using the app but keep the service you can login to Facebook in your mobile browser, and from there you can then access the service via its Web interface. This browser-based version provides a similar feature set and navigation menu, just not as user friendly and robust as the new app; albeit a useable workaround for now. So to make that your permanent option, just bookmark the mobile Facebook site (m.facebook.com), then add a shortcut to your Home screen.
If you browse over to http://www.gcflearnfree.org/ you can view their generous list of ‘how-to’ information: Facebook privacy being just one of many helpful tutorials they have.
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