Facebook Wielded User Data to Reward, Punish Rivals, Emails Show
Facebook Wielded User Data to Reward, Punish Rivals,
Emails Show
·
Documents were released by U.K. parliamentary
committee
·
Lawmaker Collins says publication was lawful in
U.K
By Nate Lanxon and Sarah Frier December 5, 2018, 6:58 AM
PST Updated on December 5, 2018, 9:31 AM PST
Facebook Inc. wielded user data like a bargaining chip,
providing access when that sharing might encourage people to spend more time on
the social network -- and imposing strict limits on partners in cases where it
saw a potential competitive threat, emails show.
A trove of internal correspondence, published online
Wednesday by U.K. lawmakers, provide insight into the ways Facebook executives
including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg treated information posted by
users like a commodity that could be harnessed in service of business goals.
In early 2013, Twitter Inc. launched the Vine
video-sharing service, which drew on a Facebook tool that let Vine users
connect to their Facebook friends. Alerted to the possible competitive threat
by an engineer who recommended cutting off Vine’s access to Facebook data,
Zuckerberg replied succinctly: “Yup, go for it.”
In other cases Zuckerberg eloquently espoused the value
of giving software developers more access to user data in hopes that it would
result in applications that, in turn, would encourage people to do more on
Facebook. "We’re trying to enable people to share everything they want,
and to do it on Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in a November 2012 email.
"Sometimes the best way to enable people to share something is to have a
developer build a special purpose app or network for that type of content and
to make that app social by having Facebook plug into it. However, that may be
good for the world but it’s not good for us unless people also share back to
Facebook and that content increases the value of our network."
The emails were released by a committee of U.K. lawmakers
investigating social media’s role in the spread of fake news.
Damian Collins, head of the committee, alleged that
Facebook shut off access to data required by competing apps and conducted
global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers possibly without their
knowledge. He also said that a change to Facebook’s Android app policy that
resulted in call and message data being recorded was deliberately made
difficult for users to know about. He explained his rationale for releasing the
emails in a tweet:
Damian Collins
✔
@DamianCollins
Replying to @DamianCollins
We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook
on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents.
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6:31 AM - Dec 5, 2018
The emails could increase scrutiny around whether
Facebook is a monopoly -- one of Facebook’s biggest current political risks.
Damien Geradin, a Brussels-based lawyer at Euclid Law, said the refusal of
access to Vine data could be seen as a "potential refusal to deal"
with rivals, "but you would need to show that Facebook" is essential
to users and it is "not clear it is."
Facebook defended its practices in a statement.
"Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various
ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform,"
Facebook said in an emailed statement. "We’ve never sold people’s data.”
Collins said last week that he would release the emails
and that he was free under U.K. law to do so. He’d obtained the documents after
compelling the founder of U.S. software company Six4Three to hand them over
during a business trip to London.
Six4Three’s founder, Ted Kramer, had obtained them as
part of a legal discovery process in a U.S. lawsuit against Facebook that his
company has brought against the social network in California.
Facebook touted itself as championing privacy four years
ago when it decided to restrict outsider developers’ access to data about its
users’ friends.
Zuckerberg in 2012 underestimated how much giving
developers access to data could be a risk. “I think we leak info to developers,
but I just can’t think if any instances where that data has leaked from
developer to developer and caused a real issue for us,” he wrote in one of the
emails. This year, he had to testify in front of U.S. Congress on one such
instance of a developer sharing user data with Cambridge Analytica, the
political consultancy.
In one email, dated Feb. 4, 2015, a Facebook engineer
said a feature of the Android Facebook app that would “continually upload” a
user’s call and SMS history would be a “high-risk thing to do from a PR
perspective.” A subsequent email suggests users wouldn’t need to be prompted to
give permission for this feature to be activated.
Kramer was ordered by a judge on Friday to surrender his
laptop to a forensic expert after admitting he turned over the documents to the
British lawmakers, in violation of a U.S. court order.
“What has happened here is unconscionable,” California
Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope said to Kramer and his attorneys during
the hearing.
Facebook wants the laptop to be evaluated to determine
what happened in the U.K., to what extent the court order was breached, and how
much of its confidential information has been divulged to the committee.
— With assistance by Aoife White
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