Facebook ‘warned of harvesting’
Facebook was told four years ago that Russians were exploiting security failings to harvest ‘‘billions’’ of items of user data each day, a British MP has claimed.
Damian Collins said yesterday he had seen an internal email that showed a Facebook engineer notifying the company in October 2014. Facebook has indicated that it only became aware of Russian interference on its platform after the United States presidential election in late 2016.
The email, the first disclosure from a large cache of seized Facebook papers that MPs plan to release , was cited at an unprecedented ‘‘Grand Committee’’ of British and international lawmakers who questioned Lord Allan of Hallam, Facebook’s European policy director.
Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the US tech giant in 2004, refused to attend.
Collins, head of the special committee, said he was not ready to publish the full cache of documents seized by the British parliament’s digital, culture, media and sport committee, which he also chairs.
The email allegedly shows that the engineer told Facebook that ‘‘entities’’ with Russian IP addresses had been pulling three billion data points a day. The data, including details of users’ Facebook friends, appeared to have been obtained by people who created apps for the Pinterest website, which gave them access to users’ Facebook data.
The alleged data harvesting came at the same time as Russia set up its Internet Research Agency. Facebook posts from the ‘‘troll factory’’, supportive of Donald Trump, were seen by 126 million Americans.