Facebook users are expressing skepticism over Facebook’s new policy regarding its Messenger app. The company has announced that users must download the app in order to continue seeing and sending messages via Facebook. The concern among users is the amount of information the app requests access to, including phone numbers, photos and videos. Additionally, the app can gain access to the users’ microphone if they decide to make a phone call through Facebook.
A majority of the concern is coming from Android users. According to Facebook, Android’s strict policy on permissions doesn’t allow Facebook to write its own policy, and instead the company has to use “generic language” provided to them by Android. Android users must also accept all of the permissions at once before using the app, whereas iPhone users can deny the app access to certain features as they come up. For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, “…if an iPhone user never makes a voice call with Facebook Messenger, the app might never ask for permission to use the phone’s microphone.”
It comes as no surprise that Facebook users may be overly sensitive to the company’s privacy policy, especially after the company released a study in which it had manipulated over 600,000 news feeds to examine how certain statuses can affect a user’s emotions. However, the newest privacy policy for the Messenger app is not much different than those for other apps smartphone owners use and therefore users shouldn’t worry about giving up any more of their personal information than they already do.
