Recently the world’s largest social network has been discovered "silently" collecting contacts of about 1.5 million users. This behavior has been implemented since May 5/2016.

Accordingly, new users who create an account will be required by Facebook application to enter their email password to confirm their account. After entering the password, the application will appear a message asking for permission to retrieve phone book data to update the friends list. If the user clicks accept, all contacts will be transferred to Facebook without any further permission.

The Facebook representative acknowledged this behavior and said there were 1.5 million users who have been contacted. However, the representative said that taking user contacts is to increase the ability to connect Facebook’s community as well as users to search for friends faster.

Facebook representative replied on Cnet: “When we look at the steps users need to perform to verify accounts, in some cases, the contacts in the user’s email are also accidentally uploaded to Facebook. Last month, we stopped asking users to enter their email password to confirm.

This social network indicates that the contacts they have taken from users will not be shared with anyone and are doing this deletion.

Users who want to make sure their contacts are not uploaded to Facebook can go to the phone’s application manager and turn off the Facebook application’s access to contacts.

Facebook currently has personal data of 2 billion users. Management agencies of many countries are questioning how these 2 billion data are being handled after the Cambridge Analytica scandal has affected 87 million users.