Facebook Looking to Read Your SMS and Other Personal Info, Says Kaspersky

Social Networking giant Facebook is back in the soup once more. According to reports, the social networking site is looking to read personal texts and other private information of users on the Android mobile phone platform, claims cyber security firm Kaspersky.

"Over the last few days there has been a constant scrutiny over Facebook having access to your SMS. Buried within the latest update for Facebook's Android app is a feature that is causing growing concern among some users," Kaspersky said in a statement on Monday.

The information was retrieved after the security firm found out that the Facebook application, at the time of installation on Android mobile phones, seeks certain personal permissions from users. And the latest updated version of the app now asks users to allow it to "Read your text messages (SMS or MMS)".

And as far as a logic to that is concerned, the site states that "if you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message."

as of now, the updated Facebook application wants to "Read calendar events plus confidential information" of the users. The site again justifies this move by saying that it is required to allow "the app to show your calendar availability (based on your phone's calendar) when you're viewing an event on Facebook."

"Two-factor authentication provides an extra level of security, so it's good to see Facebook providing this option ... As a final note, we'd urge people to carefully check the permissions requested by any app when you first install it," Kaspersky Lab's Principal Security Researcher David Emm said.

Facebook was not available for comments on the matter.