Official: Facebook gave firms special access to user data

Company denies using such info as bargaining chip.

LONDON — A key British lawmaker alleged Wednesday that Facebook maintained “whitelisting agreements” that gave select companies preferential access to valuable user data several years ago, offering insight into how the company balanced concerns about user privacy with the business imperative of growing revenue.

Damian Collins, chairman of a British parliamentary committee that has led a wide-ranging investigation into Facebook and its dealings with political consultancy Cambridge Ana- lytica, on Wednesday released a summary of findings drawn from documents from a lawsuit against the social network, along with more than 200 pages of documents, many of them labeled “Confidential.”

Collins’ allegation echoes a key claim from the lawsuit, which was filed by an app developer in a California court.

Facebook, which has long said it does not sell user data, on Wednesday denied that it used its data as a bargaining chip in exchange for advertis- ing and other concessions, as the app developer, Six4Three, has alleged in its suit.

The documents released in Britain, part of a larger trove which long have been sealed in the lawsuit, affording a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one of the world’s most prominent and profitable companies during an uncertain time.

The period covered by the documents was when Face- book, as a newly public com- pany, sought to reorganize around emerging mobile devices while seeking to manage persistent claims that it was cavalier with user privacy. Some of the companies mentioned in the newly released documents include Airbnb, Netflix, Royal Bank of Canada, Lyft, Tinder and Badoo.

A series of emails from October 2012 reveal Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s keen interest in figuring out how to extract revenue from Facebook’s trove of user data — and the app developers that relied on it. “There’s a big question on where we get revenue from,” Zuckerberg wrote to one of his executives.

“Without limiting distribution or access to friends who use this app, I don’t think we have any way to get developers to pay us at all besides offering payments and ad networks,” he continued. Zuckerberg’s private statements appear to contradict a stance he had long maintained publicly, that app developer’s access was open and free.