The secret Facebook documents have just been published by British Parliament
The secret Facebook documents have just been published by
British Parliament
By Jake Kanter December 5, 2018
The UK Parliament on Wednesday published a cache of
secret Facebook documents.
British lawmakers seized the bombshell papers last month
from Six4Three, a developer that is suing Facebook in the US.
The documents are under seal by court order in California
but were published using parliamentary privilege in the UK.
The papers show Facebook "whitelisting" firms
in return for access to data and taking "aggressive positions"
against rivals, such as Twitter's defunct video app Vine.
The documents include emails sent by Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg.
Facebook said the documents formed part of a
"baseless" lawsuit and were "misleading without additional
context." It added that it "never sold people's data."
British Parliament on Wednesday published a cache of
secret Facebook documents it obtained last month from a company suing the
social network.
A redacted version of the papers was pushed live on the
website of the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, which is
investigating Facebook's privacy standards as part of an inquiry into
"disinformation and fake news."
You can view all 250 pages of the Facebook documents
right here. https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf
Damian Collins, a Conservative politician who is chair of
the committee, prefaced the papers with a summary of what he sees as some of
the most explosive revelations. These included:
Facebook entering "whitelisting agreements"
that gave companies including Netflix and Airbnb access to friends data after
Facebook introduced new privacy policies in 2014-2015.
Collins said a recurring theme of the papers was the
"idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the
[app] developers' relationship with Facebook."
They show Facebook "taking aggressive positions
against apps," Collins said. This included email evidence showing that
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved a decision to deny access to
data for the now-defunct Twitter video-looping app, Vine.
Facebook made it difficult for users to know about changes
it made to its Android app because they were controversial. The changes enabled
Facebook to collect a record of calls and texts sent by users.
Collins obtained the documents from Ted Kramer, the
founder of a software company called Six4Three, while Kramer was on business in
the UK last month.
Six4Three is suing Facebook after its business —
specifically, an app named Pikinis that surfaced images of people's Facebook friends
in their swimwear — was decimated when the social network tightened up its
privacy policies in 2015.
A California court order had placed the documents under
seal, but the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee published them under
UK parliamentary privilege, believing them to be in the public interest.
In a series of tweets, Collins made the case for
publication.
"There is considerable public interest in releasing
these documents," he said. "They raise important questions about how
Facebook treats users data, their policies for working with app developers, and
how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market."
He added: "We don't feel we have had straight
answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing
the documents."
Zuckerberg was invited to give evidence to the Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport Committee on countless occasions. He declined every
time, and last week, the committee — along with a group of other international
lawmakers — empty-chaired Zuckerberg at a hearing. Facebook sent its policy
chief, Richard Allan, instead.
Facebook responds
A Facebook spokesman said: "As we've said many
times, the documents Six4Three gathered for their baseless case are only part
of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without
additional context.
"We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to
stop a person from sharing their friends' data with developers. Like any
business, we had many of internal conversations about the various ways we could
build a sustainable business model for our platform.
"But the facts are clear: we've never sold people's
data."
Read more about the leaked Facebook
documents:
Emails show Mark Zuckerberg personally approved Facebook's
decision to cut off Vine's access to data
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