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How to make sure Facebook isn't scraping your call data

It's an easy process, but if you haven't done it yet, now is as good a time as any.

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Mark Serrels Editorial Director
Mark Serrels is an award-winning Senior Editorial Director focused on all things culture. He covers TV, movies, anime, video games and whatever weird things are happening on the internet. He especially likes to write about the hardships of being a parent in the age of memes, Minecraft and Fortnite. Definitely don't follow him on Twitter.
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An Ars Technica investigation discovered Sunday that Facebook has been gathering phone and message metadata from Android phones . Facebook claims it does not sell this data and that it was always an "opt-in" feature. Regardless, if you want to make sure Facebook isn't collecting this data, it's a fairly easy process and there's no real good reason to leave those permissions on.

Here's how...

Step one: Find your mobile phone's settings on your Android.

Step two: Scroll down to apps and tap on that.

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Step three: Find and tap on Facebook.

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Step four: Scroll down to Permissions. 

app-info
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Step five: Make sure both telephone and SMS permissions are not selected. 

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Mark Serrels/CNET

Relatively easy, right? With those permissions off, Facebook will no longer be able to scrape the metadata of your phone calls and messages. 

Good to go!

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