Remember: On Facebook, you are the product.
Remember: on Facebook, you are the product. Eli Sanders

Via Ars Technica:

This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

Facebook, in a "fact check," confirmed that it is indeed logging call and text data "for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android," provided they have decided to "opt-in." The company continued: "We never sell this data, and this feature does not collect the content of your text messages or calls."

But Ars Technica noted that Facebook's "opt-in" process did not make it obvious to users that they were agreeing to this kind of data collection.

"Facebook never explicitly revealed that the data was being collected," Ars Technica reports, "and it was only discovered as part of a review of the data associated with the accounts. The users we talked to only performed such reviews after the recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data."

As the Associated Press notes, "Reports of the data collection came as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out ads in multiple U.S. and British Sunday newspapers to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica scandal."