Facebook confirmed on Tuesday that it had entered into trade deals for several years with four Chinese companies very close to the government of China, including Huawei, which the United States has flagged as dangerous to national security. The other companies are Lenovo, Oppo and TLC: Facebook shared some data of its users with them as part of a broad corporate strategy to grow the number of users of its social network.
A few days ago, after the publication of a New York Times investigation, Facebook admitted that it had data sharing agreements with Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung. The deals had been in place starting in 2007, when the Facebook app still didn't work well on many mobile devices. It allowed smartphone manufacturers to access some Facebook functions and therefore to obtain some information on users who used the social network from the smartphones of their production. Those who had a Huawei mobile phone, for example, could use a Huawei app that displayed messages received on Facebook on their mobile phone, similar to what happens on BlackBerry smartphones.
Facebook said that the agreement with Huawei will be closed later this week and specified that all data to which Huawei had access was not stored on Huawei's servers, but always and only on users' devices. Huawei is one of the largest handset manufacturers in the world and has received large investments from the Chinese government over the years to accelerate its expansion. The US government has long been suspicious of Huawei's activities and has asked large US telecommunications companies not to buy its products.
