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RBC defends access to Facebook data

December 19, 2018

Royal Bank of Canada is defending itself as one of more than 150 firms given access to private data in the Facebook Messenger.

The New York Times reported late Tuesday that the social media platform had granted access to private user data, that allowed companies that included Spotify, Netflix and RBC to read, write and delete private messages from Messenger users. Facebook has assured in the past that private data was protected from view. 

"RBC's use of the Facebook platform was limited to the development of a service that enabled clients to facilitate payment transactions to their Facebook friends, which was launched in December 2013," RBC said in a statement provided by spokesman Al Goodman. "As part of our security and fraud protocols, we needed to uniquely identify the recipient of funds and payments to securely process the transaction and deliver the notification."

The statement said that the bank decommissioned the service in 2015, and ended its Facebook access at that time.

A key Facebook official defended the practice in a blog post Tuesday, claiming that data sharing with integration partners allowed users to have access to Facebook accounts on other platforms, such as Apple, Amazon, Blackberry and Yahoo, and that it allowed more social experiences on third-party apps such as Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora and Spotify.

"To be clear, none of these partnerships or features gave gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, director of  developer platforms and programs, wrote in the post.