Zuck'd Again: Facebook Shared Sensitive User Info Via "Secretive" Data Deals

If you feel like there's been a new embarrassing revelation about Facebook's privacy practices every day this week, well, you're not entirely wrong. In the third bombshell report to drop since Moday, the Wall Street Journalis reporting that Facebook struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, granting several of them special access to user records well after the point in 2015 when Facebook said it had shifted its privacy policies in response to learning that a researcher had improperly taken Facebook user data and sold it to Cambridge Analytica.

The unreported agreements were known internally as whitelists. They reportedly allowed certain companies to access sensitive information like phone numbers and a metric called "friend that measured the degree of closeness between users and others in their network," the people said.