Facebook “partner” arrangements: Are they as bad as they look?

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg may be in for another round of hearings, thanks to the latest NYT report on Facebook's sharing of user data with partners. But was it really 'sharing?' (credit: Getty Images)
A report by The New York Times on Tuesday evening laid out a series of apparently scandalous revelations about how Facebook gave other technology companies access to users’ private information, including friends lists and private messages. The report, however, may have exaggerated the scope of Facebook partners’ access to that data, which in many cases was limited to application integration.
Still, while Facebook executives have responded to the report by claiming that all access to user data was given with explicit permission from the users, the report does raise concerns that Facebook was not entirely transparent about how far those permissions went. For just one example, look at how Facebook harvested phone call records and SMS data on Android devices through Facebook applications.
In a statement issued Tuesday night, Facebook's director of developer platforms, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, wrote of the integration features offered to Facebook partners:
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