Facebook Android Messenger and phone records
There was a report that Facebook is collecting phone records from its Android users. This is based on the fact that the Facebook Messenger Android app and Facebook Lite app give users the option to import phone contacts so that they can easily identify their Facebook friends who are in their contact list. This is a very common practice on many apps. In a blog post, Facebook said that the syncing feature “helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.” The company said that it never shares this data with third parties.
However, Facebook apparently also accessed logs of actual calls and text by default, according to Ars Technica.
Currently, as you can see from the graphic below, Facebook does ask for permission before syncing your phone contacts and acknowledges that it also uploads “your call and text history.” The default is off but if you press that big blue button, it gets turned on.
According to, Ars Technica Facebook didn’t always give people this option, saying that Facebook’s argument that this has always been opt-in “contradicts the experience of several users who shared their data with Ars.”
Off by default
Whatever the history is, today syncing of phone records is off by default and turned either through settings or by clicking “turn on” in the permission dialog box that comes up when you install the app. Having said that, as you can see from the notice below, the big blue “turn on” button that opts-you in is a lot bigger than the “not now” button. The ability for that feature to capture call and text records, according to Ars Technica, was based on what was possible in an earlier versions of Android (prior Android 4.1 or “Jelly Bean”)— that “also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default.” The blog said “the permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API (application program interface).
How to make sure you’re not syncing phone data
Facebook has instructions on how to stop your Messenger app from syncing your phone contacts.