Facebook has collected information about mobile phone conversations and text messages for years

• Only by permission, Facebook claims.

The king of social media is already in a hurry due to the ongoing leakage scandal, and now, sites like Ars Technica and Mashable report that users have discovered, surprisingly, that Facebook has stored information on mobile phone calls for a long time.

One user posted a Twitter message indicating that Facebook has registered two years of metadata about phone calls from his Android phone. This included names, phone numbers, time and length of the phone calls.

A number of other people report similar findings, and reports are also reported on storage of metadata related to SMS and MMS messages. The information must have been retrieved via the Messenger app.

As an answer to the claims for storage of call and SMS history without consent, Facebook has posted a post on its websites.

It is believed that they have only stored this after the user has given permission. It is also explained how this can be turned off and we will know that all such history is deleted when the user wishes to no longer avail of this functionality.

It is also emphasized that the contents of neither messages nor calls are stored.

If you are interested in finding out if Facebook is storing such information from you, check out the SMS settings in the Messenger app. If this is turned off, Facebook should not rely on such data.

Android users may have given access without knowing about it
What makes matters a little more problematic, however, is that many users may have given access to the more detailed information without knowing it. If Facebook gave permission to read contact information on older Android versions, more specifically versions older than 4.1 Jelly Bean, it also granted automatic access to call and SMS logs.

This was addressed in later Android versions, but these changes could still be met by developers using an older Android API (API). That way, it has been possible to continue collecting metadata about phone calls and text messages despite the fact that users have thought that this permission was not granted.

This is only true for the Android platform, not the iOS platform.

• Understand if people react

"I understand if people react to this and many will probably discuss it. It is also not surprising that so few have received this. But the use of this data is one of many ways of compiling information between people, and that is what it is used for in this context, he says.

"We all approve a lot of things we do not know about this way. At the same time, it varies greatly how much a service like Facebook reveals such details.

You can check yourself
Should you, for security reasons, want to see all the information Facebook has on you, you can download all your data for review.

To do this, go to the Facebook settings menu at the top right and then tap "Download a copy of your Facebook data" at the bottom of the screen.

The information from Facebook shows pretty well both call and SMS logs retrieved from the phone, back to September. The logs also show calls up to now, ie March 2018.