Social media giant Facebook has been involved in quite a lot of controversies within the last one year alone, starting off with the Cambridge Analytica data assortment scandal, to a brand new report currently that the corporate is asking some new users for passwords to their email accounts as a way of verifying their identity.
If that scares you, it should. in step with the Daily Beast, that initial reported the difficulty, some new users ar being prompted by Facebook to supply their email passwords after they attempt to sign up for the social media platform,
In what security consultant Jake Williams says may be a follow that blows right past questionable, and into “beyond sketchy” territory by the corporate.
According to reports, the prompt seems once Facebook thinks a sign-up try is suspicious, and, apparently, the choice solely seems for email addresses that don’t support OAuth — a typical that’s adopted by most major email providers.
As you may expect, providing your password to anyone, as well as a corporation that’s probably the smallest amount trusted technology company these days, may be a terrible idea.
In an exceedingly statement given to Gizmodo, a Facebook spokesperson claimed that “these passwords are not keep by Facebook,” and added that the prompt only appeared for a “very small” range of users.
The company additionally clarified that people given with this selection could always choose to authenticate by alternative means that, like their phone number or email address.
What’s worse, is that Business insider noted that signing up for an account by using this method prompts the user that Facebook is importing their contacts also, however it’s not clear if contacts were actually imported.
Anyway, Facebook has confirmed that the corporate can stop the follow of asking users for their passwords, however the very fact that it did this anyway and didn’t stop till it had been reported on, puts yet another mark on its ‘not-so-clean’ record once it involves user privacy and data.
Facebook has seen itself at the center of variety of major controversies, together with things like launching a VPN app that captured users’ knowledge, using 2FA as the simplest way to spam users’ phones with text messages and to get their phone numbers for targeted ads.
Last month, it had been additionally noted that the corporate reportedly keep millions of passwords in plaintext. needless to mention, this latest addition to Facebook’s long list of privacy and security practices isn’t going to facilitate the corporate regain user trust any time soon.
