Facebook Tells Congress It Shared User Data with More Companies

Facebook comes clean. Again. 

The tech company admitted to providing numerous tech companies special access to user data in documents sent to Congress on Friday.

This release of documents follows the questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received during a congressional hearing in April. It's also the second round of documents meant to answer questions from Congress. The first round of was released June 8.

While Facebook claimed it restricted companies' access to user data after 2015, the company had made agreements with 61 tech companies, including AOL, UPS and dating app Hinge, to provide a temporary extension, allowing them special access to user data.

This included the names of friends, their genders and dates of birth. Facebook says this was so that these companies could comply with the social network's new privacy policy.

"We engaged companies to build integrations for a variety of devices, operating systems and other products where we and our partners wanted to offer people a way to receive Facebook or Facebook experiences," the company said in the documents to Congress. "These integrations were built by our partners, for our users, but approved by Facebook."

Facebook said that roughly half of these partnerships have ended and it plans to discontinue seven more by the end of July, CNET reports.

Since news broke of Facebook's involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company's tendency to play fast and loose with user data keeps coming to light, in addition to all the other unusual things they can do and potentially plan to do with user data.