It was quiet about Facebook, but the company sees itself placed in a new privacy scandal. Phone numbers that are meant to secure accounts are used for very different purposes.
Without a user having given Facebook permission to use his phone number for advertisements, that happens anyway. This is shown by research by tech blog Gizmodo in collaboration with researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University.
This can happen in different ways. The first trick Facebook uses to reach its advertisers as targeted as possible is a particularly striking one: the company abuses data that its users have given to secure their account better.
This so-called two-stage verification makes it possible to prevent unauthorised users from logging on to an unknown device, even if they have access to the username and password.