USA TODAY International Edition
Facebook emails show it explored selling data
Company says it studied charging developers
SAN FRANCISCO – Internal Facebook emails published online by U.K. lawmakers, some involving CEO Mark Zuckerberg, paint a picture of a company aggressively hunting for ways to make money from the reams of personal information it was collecting from users.
Wednesday’s release of some 250 pages of emails from 2012 to 2015 – a period of dramatic growth for the newly publicly traded company – provides a rare glimpse into Facebook’s internal conversations, suggesting the social media giant gave preferential access to some third-party app developers such as Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix, while restricting access for others. It also considered charging app developers for access to data, despite pledges that it would never do so.
There is no indication that Facebook went forward with a proposal to charge app developers for access to the personal information of Facebook users. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg denied Facebook ever sold or considered selling the data of its more than 2 billion users.
“Like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas. Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continued to provide the developer platform for free and developers could choose to buy ads if they wanted,” he wrote in a Facebook post responding to the release of the internal emails by U.K. lawmakers.
“Other ideas we considered but decided against included charging developers for usage of our platform, similar to how developers pay to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. To be clear, that’s different from selling people’s data. We’ve never sold anyone’s data.”
According to some of the emails, Facebook discussed cutting off access to rival companies and giving app developers who bought advertising special access to data. It also provided access to app developers that encouraged Facebook users to spend more time on the social network.
The revelations that shed light on previously unknown Facebook practices were included in internal documents seized by U.K. lawmakers from the developer of a now-defunct bikini photo searching app, Pikinis, as part of an investigation into fake news. The emails were sealed in a California lawsuit filed by Six4Three. Six4Three sued Facebook in 2015, alleging the social network’s data policies favored some companies over others.
“I’ve been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend .... if we make it so (developers) can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform,” Zuckerberg wrote in one email.
In another email in 2012, Zuckerberg seemed to shrug off concerns about the security of Facebook users’ data. “I think we leak info to developers, but I just can’t think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused real issue for us,” he wrote.
Facebook called the Six4Three lawsuit “baseless” and says the company “cherrypicked” documents. “The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context,” the company said in a statement.
Public trust in Facebook’s handling of people’s personal information has been shaken by a series of crises. Chief among them is Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign that has been accused of improperly accessing millions of Facebook accounts without users’ consent.
A British researcher and his firm, Global Science Research, legitimately gained access to personal data of Facebook users in 2013 while working on a personality app and passed that data to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook began restricting app developers’ access user data in 2014 and 2015.
“We still stand by the platform changes we made in 2014/2015, which prevented people from sharing their friends’ information with developers like the creators of Pikinis,” Facebook said in a statement. “The extensions we granted at that time were short term and only used to prevent people from losing access to specific functions as developers updated their apps. Pikinis didn’t receive an extension, and they went to court.”
Damian Collins, chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport parliamentary committee investigating Facebook, said lawmakers released the documents because “we don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues.”
“Like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas. Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continued to provide the developer platform for free.”
Mark Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post