If you haven't seen it for yourself, Facebook has been abuzz today with this viral status update:
The cause of the concern being that many users have suddenly realized that their Facebook contacts now have ‘handy’ cell phone numbers attached to them, seemingly by magic. The way Facebook has achieved this is through the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry Facebook apps, which now use cell phone number information by default whenever you sync your phone with Facebook.
Facebook has actually been doing this for months and has never actively concealed this information from any of its users. But it’s never exactly hung a lantern on it either. The ability to delete all imported contacts has been around for a while and any time you went in to your “Edit Friends” section the phone numbers were there clear as day.
Facebook claims this information is to offer you the best Facebook experience possible by improving your recommended friends list, suggested sites or groups you might like and other things of a similar nature.
So why the sudden spread of outraged users? We’re not sure what triggered it exactly, but it’s obvious that Facebook didn’t exactly do a stellar job of keeping its devoted users up to date on how much information they were giving to their beloved social media site.
The most curious thing is that the above Facebook Status was often accompanied by a link that offered users information on how to unsync their phones and delete the unwanted phone numbers form their account. The link could originally be found here, but as you can see all text on the page has since been deleted. We ourselves visited the web page just this morning with all its text and information still intact. Unfortunately we didn’t think to copy or screen-capture it at the time.
The good news is that cell phone numbers seem to fall under the category of “Contact Details”, even though it’s not an option in the Edit Contact Details field. What this means is that if you have your contact details security set to display to Friends Only then only your Facebook friends should be able to see your phone number. If you don’t have your contact details set to Friends Only may we highly recommend you do, as we love our readers and want you all to stay safe.
If you would like to know how to both delete the numbers from your online account and also unsync your phone you can check it out here. Otherwise we’ve included a quick bit of info below on how to do it yourself.
Removing imported contacts from your online Facebook profile
Go to this page. Below the title “Remove All Imported Contacts” there is a box labelled “I understand the consequences”. Check this box and then click the “Remove All Imported Contacts” button.
Facebook is pretty sketchy on just what these consequences are, but after hunting around the net for a bit it seems like all that will change is that your various Facebook suggestions will decrease in relevancy. We made this move a few hours ago to make sure nothing bad would happen and as yet we haven’t noticed a single lick of difference on any of our Facebook accounts.
Unsyncing your phone from Facebook:
Every phone will be different, as the Facebook UI changes from operating system to operating system.
For iPhones Facebook has the information already available. Open the Facebook app on your phone, click on the Friends icon in the main menu and then click Sync in the upper-right.
For Androids and BlackBerry devices we’re actually not sure. We’ve been fiddling around with an Android for a while now and haven’t come up with any answers. Unfortunately we don’t have any BlackBerry phones in the office today, so if anyone knows how we’d appreciate any info in the comments section below.
At the End of the Day
Like we said earlier, Facebook has been doing this for months and there have been numerous blog posts all over the web about it during that time. For many people this will be no big deal, as your Friends List is often comprised of people you don’t mind giving your number to. But there will be others who we would consider to be understandably distressed at this information.
We would like to see Facebook give us a little more wiggle room in just who gets to see our mobile number, if anyone at all. But until then it seems like it’s either all or nothing for the Facebook-syncing socialite. Which do you think you prefer?
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