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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

What’s the supposed justification for scraping text message data? I mean the contact list could be justified as a means of cross referencing friends. I’m having a hard time coming up with a legitimate use for text message data. Best I’ve got is “who do you contact regularly?” which is still insanely creepy.

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Is it known yet whether they just collect metadata or collect message contents?

I can't see any justification for collecting the actual text of my messages.

But if I'm digging for justifications, I can see some benefit to me, the user, of collecting aggregate stats of who I contact regularly. It could be used to decide what content to surface in my feed. Or whose birthday to remind me of. Or which names to suggest when I create an event invite. They are a social platform, after all, so knowing who I socialize with seems relevant to making that work better.

Not that it isn't creepy, but if the question is whether there's an actual benefit to their having the data beyond just targeting ads, it's somewhat plausible.

Isn't all of this for friend suggestions? The people you text most often are more likely to be your friends.

Other services ask you to give them your email username and password, so that they can scrape your inbox to discover your contacts. I think LinkedIn used to do this, but they appear to just use SSO with the largest providers now.

I think it's "This helps us orient both ad- and non-ad- content on Facebook to fit you optimally and keep you on Facebook and also figure out why people keep texting instead of using FB Messenger."

That’s not a justification that helps the user much though.

Who cares about the user?

but it exploits them for profit much, thus serving the primary mission: shareholder value

I never manage the address book in my email app, and when some services want your Gmail or Yahoo Mail credentials so it can import contacts, having an empty address book makes that useless. So yeah, the "clever" importers trawled through your mailboxes for the adresses. I'm guessing they thought they needed to do the same for phone contacts - which doesn't make sense because people actually manage that, although I've met one person who doesn't do that - she doesn't seem to need to know who is calling/writing her.

This is speaking speculatively but Facebook right now is heavily trying to go into Messaging AI (Messenger) and so it needs to train those AI. I'm actually kinda surprised if they foresaw that training data so early but yeah it's really creepy.

It's not hard to foresee wanting "everything" with the goal of sorting it out later, but Messenger is a no-brainer for FB if they want to continue having access to message content.

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