Why Facebook Wants Your Bank Account Statements
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Your Money Briefing. Money and market stories from The Wall Street Journal.
I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. Data privacy concerns have been plaguing Facebook for several months, and now the social media giant wants banks to hand over your bank account balances and bank card transactions. We'll explain why in a moment. First, these money headlines. Could the red-hot U.S.
What bank data did Facebook request and why does it matter?
labor market get even hotter? The Wall Street Journal real-time economics team points out that last month, The share of Americans with a job, known as the employment-to-population ratio, ticked up to the highest level since January of 2009. For prime-age workers, that excludes people more likely to be in school or retired, the rate was the highest since May 2008. The ratio has been slowly climbing as unemployment falls, but it remains below its peak. That suggests there are still potential workers on the sidelines of the labor force looking for a way in. And a survey of senior bank officers by the Federal Reserve shows that amid heightened competition, banks loosen the rules when it comes to business loans to companies of all sizes in the second quarter.
It was a different story for consumers. The survey indicated many banks tightened standards and terms on credit card loans. And for residential real estate and auto loans, the standards and terms remain the same last quarter. This is your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, everybody. In an effort to broaden its services beyond just connecting its users with friends, Facebook has asked large banks for their customers' checking account balances and card transaction history. Deepa Sitharaman covers Facebook for The Wall Street Journal, and she joins us to discuss. So, Deepa, Facebook is hoping to be a platform where users can buy and sell goods?
Yeah, so here's what we know. Facebook has had these conversations with banks over the last year, and they really It's all part of this broader push to make Messenger a useful platform, a way to get things done, to shop, to bank potentially, to do a wide variety of things beyond just chatting with your friends. And so it's been a big focus for Messenger specifically for the last few years. And these discussions were part of a push to to kind of get messenger to that place now what is facebook hoping to learn about the bank's customers from the data they've asked for what facebook has said monday was that they that this data wouldn't be used for advertising or any other purpose uh for the company besides allowing banks to build services on top of messenger uh of course facebook stands to benefit if uh
If these services are popular, people will use Messenger more. That's how it benefits the company. But for now, what Facebook is saying is that this data would just be used to provide useful services to bank customers over Messenger.
And they emphasize that it would not be used for advertising purposes.
Yes, they have emphasized that again and again with us through the course of this reporting and again today. This is not going to be used according to them. The financial data that they get directly from banks would not be used to target ads, wouldn't be used for ranking or for the broader product. It'll just be used for a potential hypothetical still feature.
Have the banks made their customers aware of the fact that this information has been requested by sites like Facebook?
No, I mean, it doesn't seem that anybody really knew that these conversations were happening until we reported it. And it's not live for many banks. You know, Facebook's had a lot of these conversations with banks like JP Morgan, etc. And so this feature isn't live.
Okay, so they're more or less laying the groundwork for what they would like to do down the line.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Now, there's no doubt this is going to raise privacy issues again, which have plagued Facebook for some time. That's got to be raising some eyebrows all around.
Absolutely. It's been raising eyebrows, especially since March, since the Facebook disclose that Cambridge Analytica had kind of walked away with a lot of data about users and sold it.
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