This may come as a shock considering how seriously Facebook takes your privacy, but if you’re a Facebook user with one of the Facebook’s mobile applications installed on your iPhone or one of several other smartphones, you’ve been robbed. Each and every contact stored on your phone is probably now stored on Facebook’s servers, as was re-re-discovered by Facebook users this past week. Whether or not people in your contact list even have Facebook accounts, their names and phone numbers are now in Facebook’s possession. There is probably a clause buried deep within Facebook’s terms and conditions that makes this invasion of your privacy OK on paper, but odds are still pretty good that it’s not OK with you. It should also be noted that no terms and conditions display on your device when installing and logging into many versions of Facebook’s mobile app, so you likely did not give Facebook permission to take possession of your private contact data at the time the app was installed. Complete instructions outlining how to remove all of your contacts phone numbers from your Facebook account can be found below. Whether or not the data will be completely wiped from Facebook’s servers is unclear, but we’ll leave that for the lawyers to figure out!
- Visit facebook.com from a PC and log in.
- In the top-right corner of the screen, click on Account and then Edit Friends.
- In the menu on the left side of the screen, click on Contacts.
- Here you will that each and every one of your contacts in Address Book are listed along with their phone numbers…wipe the look of shock and disgust from your face!
- On the right side of the screen, click on the “this page” link.
- Follow the instructions on this page – you’ll have to disable contact-sync in Facebook’s mobile app if it’s enabled – and click the Remove button.
[Source: BGR]
