RBC denies ability to see users’ Facebook messages
TORONTO Royal Bank of Canada said Wednesday that it did not have the power to see the messages of Facebook Inc. users, rejecting part of a newspaper report that alleged the lender had been granted enhanced access by the social media network.
The bank said in a statement that its use of the Facebook “platform” had been confined to its work on a feature announced in December 2013, which allowed customers to send funds to Facebook Messenger contacts through an RBC app.
According to a release at the time, the recipient would get a message and then have to log into the bank’s online portal to deposit the money.
“As part of our security and fraud protocols, we needed to uniquely identify the recipient of funds and payments to securely process the transaction and deliver the notification,” RBC said on Wednesday. “We did not have the ability to see users’ messages. We decommissioned the service in 2015 and our limited access, which was used strictly to enable our clients’ payments, ended at that time.”
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Facebook had granted companies “more intrusive” access to user data than had been disclosed, and that Facebook had allowed RBC, as well as Netflix Inc. and Spotify Technology S.A., to “read, write and delete” the private messages of users.
Facebook said its work was partly to allow access to Facebook and its features on the non-facebook-made devices or platforms of other firms. It said that most of the related features are now gone.
“To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission ..., ” said Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, in a blog post.
Facebook said its partners did receive access to messages, but that users had to “explicitly” sign in to Facebook before they could use these features. There was no mention of RBC in the response, which used Spotify as an example.