A British Parliament commission today released 250 pages of documents showing how Facebook took decisive action to benefit some companies on its platform and hinder others. More generally, the documents contain communications in which top Facebook executives (including Mark Zuckerberg) discuss handling user data without giving the impression that they care much about their privacy and security. The documents were collected during a lawsuit against Facebook by the US company Six4Three, and were acquired by the British Parliament.
As the New York Times explained, after restricting in 2015 the number and types of user data that app developers companies on the platform could have access to, Facebook allowed some companies – including Airbnb and Netflix – to continue to have access to previously available data. At the same time, Facebook prevented companies perceived as competing (for example, Twitter, Vine) from having access to data and information available to other developers. However, there is no evidence in the documents that Facebook has ever sold information about its users to other companies, which the company has always denied.
Among the documents published by the British parliament there are also some that show that Facebook executives and employees discussed the possibility of giving more access to their data to developers who paid Facebook to publish advertisements. The documents also say that Facebook tried to hide from users the fact that the app installed on some Android devices could, under certain conditions, obtain information about messages and calls made with that phone, also to provide more relevant results in the “People you might know “. In an email, in fact, the Facebook project manager recognizes the thing as “quite risky from a public relations point of view.” Indeed, it seems that Facebook tried to make users not notice it.
The widespread emails also mention Onavo, a company that offers a VPN connection service – that is, particularly confidential internet connections through the creation of a virtual private network – that Facebook had acquired. Being able to analyze the data relating to the internet traffic of the people who used Onavo – as stated by the conditions of the service – the Facebook executives monitored the competing social networks and, for example, studied the great rise of WhatsApp among the messaging services. A year after starting the analysis of the data collected, Facebook bought WhatsApp.
The documents refer to the period from 2012 to 2015, in which Facebook had a great growth and, consequently, found itself with a large amount of information and data on more and more users. Facebook said in a note that the documents are only “part of the story” and that, without the necessary context, they are misleading. In fact, in many cases there are single emails, without it being possible to read the whole conversation, from start to finish. Facebook chief and founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post to provide some context to the content of the emails, in which he says, “Like any company, we face a lot of discussions on a variety of topics. In the end, we decided to give all app developers free use of our platform, leaving them to decide whether or not to buy advertisements on our platform. It is a model that has worked well. Among the other ideas that we took into consideration, and in the end discarded, there was also the possibility of asking for a payment to the developers who use our platform “.
Damian Collins, chairman of the parliamentary commission that published the documents, explained on Twitter that he considers the documents of public interest, “because they ask important questions about how Facebook treats user data, how it decides to collaborate with those who develop other apps, and how it exercises its dominant position in the social media sector “.
Facebook's growth in terms of users is continuing to slow and is essentially at a standstill in the United States and declining in Europe, two of its most important markets for advertising revenue. The company is going through a very complicated period, finding itself at the center of numerous controversies for Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections, for the Cambridge Analytica case, for a recent large security flaw and for a growing mistrust and disaffection on the part of its users. .
