truth behind Facebook phone syncing furore

Facebook users are up in arms about a "new" change that sees mobile phone numbers stored on the site. Picture: Thinkstock

Sometime in the past few weeks, you may have seen a status update from a friend warning about mobile phone numbers being "published" by Facebook.

"ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS (sic) in your phone are now on Facebook," says one popular version of the warning.

"Re-post this on your status, so friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse if they do not want them published."

As it turns out, this is old news. It's also wrong.

The option to sync your mobile phone contacts to your Facebook account has been around since version 3.1 of the Facebook for iPhone app, released last January.

The service lets you store a backup of all your contact numbers on Facebook, to use if you lose your phone.

The numbers are not published for public view. Only you can see them, and Facebook told news.com.au it did not sell or share users' phone numbers with third parties.

So, what's with all the outrage?

Nick Ellsmore of security firm Stratsec said that with this kind of public panic came a certain enjoyment — people want Facebook to be wrong.

"Facebook exists really in a world of its own," he told news.com.au.

"There's obviously the movie The Social Network, there's all of the various privacy issues and privacy concerns that have happened over the years.

"There are a lot of people looking for it to have security and privacy problems, and a lot of people who want it to have (those) problems."

A spokesperson for Facebook told news.com.au that the syncing service was structured to make sure only you could see your contact numbers.

"Rumours claiming that your phone contacts are visible to everyone on Facebook are false," they said.

"Our contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time. The phone numbers listed there were either added by your friends themselves (on Facebook) and made visible to you, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook.

"Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers."

While Facebook has in the past been criticised for not communicating important changes to its users, Mr Ellsmore believes that, this time, it may not be the website's fault.

"To be honest I very much doubt it was badly communicated," he said.

"There have been blog posts about it, there's information posted about it, the Facebook page that talks about it explains the fact that this isn't a surprise issue.

"This is a feature, this is something they effectively promoted and one of the reasons why they said their tool and the iPhone app was a good thing."

Mr Ellsmore said that sometimes, users didn't take the time to fully investigate their privacy options on sites like Facebook.

"Certainly there have been various studies done over the years that show pop-up warnings are read to a very limited extent," he said.

"Something pops up and says 'do you want to do this and here's some text explaining what it means'... generally speaking, a lot of people are going to click 'yes' without really taking the time to focus on it."

Far from being risky, Mr Ellsmore said that for many users, a phone number syncing service may actually be useful.

"It's actually a two-way sync," he said.

"The sync of the phone numbers across to Facebook basically means that if you lose your phone then you have that data available elsewhere, which is handy.

"It's basically a back-up technique and we've (as security experts) been telling users to back things up for as long as we can remember.

"The other way it goes is as the phone numbers go from your phone into Facebook, things like your friends' pictures can go across to your phone and update that as well."

One Sydney office worker in her 20s — who asked not to be named — told news.com.au she found having her friends' numbers on Facebook especially useful on nights out.

"Random, meandering nights and especially festivals are the times I've realised that I don't have people's numbers," she said.

"I've gone to post things on people's wall people and been pleasantly surprised by having access to their phone number.

"I have mine on my profile and that's because I want the people I'm connected with to be able to contact me."

However others aren't convinced. Karalee Evans, digital media strategist for ad firm Text 100, said she no longer trusted Facebook after its earlier privacy blunders.

"I run an iPhone and I run a BlackBerry — one's for work and one's personal — and I disabled syncing on both," she said.

"I think if it wasn't Facebook, perhaps it might be a different story. I have other online cloud storage for different things, including my contacts book.

"However I do question the history of Facebook. They have a pretty horrendous history of privacy breaches."

Ms Evans said that despite Facebook's assurances, she believed apps could make people's phone numbers more widely available than they expected and users should be on guard.

"A colleague of mine, she was finding that her mobile number was appearing on her status updates because she was updating from her mobile phone, an iPhone," she said.

"We had to go through her entire profile as well as her phone to find the bug, when you enter your mobile phone when you download the app.

"We had to clear her entire privacy settings to find that. We took the app off the phone and then put it back on and didn’t enter the mobile phone number when we were reinstalling it.

"Whether it was a bug specific to what she was uploading at the time, I don’t know.

"I guess this is the question, because Facebook does have such a questionable history — how much can you be confident any data you enter, whether its facebook.com or an app, (you'll know) where it goes?"

Regardless of whether the phone syncing features are as diabolical as many believe, Mr Ellsmore said any extra attention being paid to privacy settings was a good thing.

"As much as you say the rumours and furore around this might be a little manufactured and a little unrealistic, I think it serves a valid point if the end result is that (when) someone installs the next version of the Facebook iPhone app and it asks them a question about what they want to sync, they think a little more about it," he said.

"As Facebook starts getting more and more information, as Facebook starts getting access to more data, the important thing really is that users have to be very diligent with protecting their account and treating it like something that is important."

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/the-truth-behind-the-facebook-phone-number-furore/story-e6frfro0-1226115311567#ixzz1V5GFhRWh