Dozens of emails and internal documents of Facebook between 2012 and 2015 show the debate in the company about how to benefit from the growing amount of data of their users available. The revelation comes from the committee of the british Parliament that is responsible for investigating the case of Cambridge Analytica, the fake news and the possible manipulation of elections in the networks. Last week Mark Zuckerberg declined to travel to London to testify on these documents, which are under secret of summary, in the US.
Facebook, in order to maintain access to their data to companies like Airbnb or Netflix after closing them for the rest of the developers: “will allow Us to see ‘all friends’, not only to the friends connected,” wrote an employee from Netflix in February 2015. “It is not clear how Facebook decided which companies should continue to have access to the data and what’s not”, says the mp Damian Collins, chairman of the committee of the Parliament.”
Collins announced in a tweet by its decision to publish the documents: “I Believe that there is significant public interest in publishing these documents. They raise significant doubts about how Facebook uses data, your policies for working with developers of apps and how it exerts its dominant position in the market of social networks”.
The reading of the emails shows continuous internal debates on how to achieve more profits without stepping on any red line which will trigger future problems of privacy.
In the messages to appreciate the candor of those discussions on Facebook on how to extract new revenues from data of users who ran the social network: “I’ve been thinking a lot about the business model of the platform this weekend,” Oleybet wrote Mark Zuckerberg in a email in October 2012. “Login with Facebook is always free. Putting content on Facebook is always free. Read what that is, including friends, costs a lot of money. Perhaps in the order of $0,10 per user per year”. According to Zuckerberg that money could be paid for with ads on the platform or, if no sum is enough, “pay a fee”.
The lack of understanding of the potential consequences of their decisions is especially enlightening today, years later, after the scandal of Cambridge Analytica: “I’m skeptical that there is much danger of data breaches as you think”, wrote Zuckerberg in October 2012. “I believe that we filter information to developers, but I can’t think of any instance where these data have been filtered from developer to developer and have caused a real problem for us. Do you have any example of this?” In 2012, that is public, there had been no filtration yet. The case of Cambridge Analytica would happen the following year. In 2015, Facebook would shut down access to its platform to all developers except to chosen companies.
In an email of February 2015, an engineer of Facebook, wrote that one function of the app of Facebook for Android phones that “would continually” the history of calls and SMS users was “something with a lot of risk from the point of view of public relations”. In another message, the same engineer explained that the users did not need to be alerted that they should give permission to activate this function.
Facebook has responded to the publication of the document. Are “just part of the story”. “We continue to believe the changes that we made in 2015, to prevent a person share the data of your friends with developers,”the company says in a press release. “Like all companies, we had many internal conversations about the ways in which we can build a sustainable business for our platform. But the facts are clear: never sold data to people”.
The Parliament managed the internal documents of Facebook by a process rarely used: the sergeant at arms of the Parliament visited him in his London hotel the founder of the development company of apps Six4Three at the end of November. There he announced that he was obliged to give the documentation that he owned on Facebook, despite being an american citizen. Six4Three possessed documentation after you have reported to Facebook in the united States by the changes of privacy that led him to close your app Bikinis, which allowed to search for pictures of your friends in a swimsuit.
