Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Wednesday, December 19th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, I'm sorry, I truly am, but there's another Facebook scandal to tell you about the

boring company unvails its tunnel swift is gamification a fitness app play a

social network VR and e-sports all in one startup, and

why touch ID might be coming back to the iPhone.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Do I want to do yet another segment about a Facebook data and or privacy scandal?

No, I do not.

Could I basically write up a template that I could use each time one of these scandals surfaces and then just

insert whatever new dates or details were relevant I guess I could.

Certainly the wrote explanations slash denials,

slash apologies that Facebook trots out.

Every time one of these things happens,

they certainly are starting to sound like Cookie Cutter at this point.

It's getting absurd at this late date, but hey, give Facebook credit for ending 2018

as it's essentially spent the whole year the whole time. In an investigation

the New York Times looked at internal Facebook documents which the Times says

reveal that Facebook gave around 150 companies access to more user data than had previously been disclosed.

Some of these partner companies could do things like read private direct messages.

Facebook wants to stress that this practice did not violate its consent decree that it has

with the Federal Trade Commission relating to the handling of user data.

Quoting from the Times Peace, Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names

of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent, the record show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages.

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