It has been found that users with certain Samsung phones cannot fully delete Facebook on their devices. Samsung responded to this saying they provide a pre-installed Facebook app on selected models with options to disable it, demonstrating the app as inactive – however the true implications of this are unknown.
Consumers are becoming more aware of their digital rights and more vigilant about their privacy, following last year’s revelations about Facebook’s information-sharing practices and scrutiny of online data collection. Users are suspicious as to whether the Facebook app is truly inactive when not yet accessed or disabled.
Facebook have declined to provide a list of the partners with which it has deals for permanent apps, meaning that consumers may not know if Facebook is pre-loaded unless they specifically ask, and therefore are unaware of how to disable it if they don’t wish to use it.
However, Facebook is not the only company whose apps show up on smartphones by default. The Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, also comes loaded with many Google apps such as YouTube, Google Play Music and Gmail, shown by a T-Mobile US Inc. list of built-in apps. Twitter is another app which is preloaded onto certain models by default, however, the app won’t collect any data unless a user had opened and logged on to an account.
Apple, whose iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. but not the rest of the world, doesn’t pre-install Facebook or any other third-party apps on its new phones.