Facebook says businessman leaked secret papers to MPS

FACEBOOK has accused a US businessman at the centre of a row over what the social network knew about the Cambridge Analytica scandal of leaking sealed court documents to MPS.

Ted Kramer, head of an app company suing Facebook, was last week ordered by Parliament to hand over internal emails to Damian Collins, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

A California court had ordered the emails be kept secret as part of the ongoing lawsuit against the social network, but Mr Kramer says he was given no choice when confronted at a London hotel room by Parliament’s Serjeant-at-arms and threatened with imprisonment.

Facebook’s lawyers claim Mr Kramer orchestrated the release to circumvent a US court order accusing him of a “long-standing effort to unseal these documents”.

MPS this week used the leaked emails to question Facebook over how soon it knew about a loophole in its service that allowed millions of users’ data to be harvested without their consent.

The emails were originally obtained by Mr Kramer’s lawyers as part of a lawsuit by his company Six4three, which alleges that Facebook destroyed its business by tightening its regulations in 2015.

Before the crackdown, Facebook had been exploited by a researcher to harvest the personal data of 87million users. That data was then sold to a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly used it during Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign in 2016.