Zuckerberg defends Facebook in data breach controversy
The Facebook chief featured in one email exchange from 2012 in which he mulled selling the information to developers
WASHINGTON: Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on Wednesday against emails showing the social media giant offering Netflix and other popular apps preferential access to people’s data even after it had tightened its privacy rules.
A British parliamentary committee investigating whether the social media behemoth was being used to manipulate the results of elections published 250 pages of internal Facebook documents earlier Wednesday.
They show executives holding discussions about big companies such as Netlix being granted preferential access to user data even after Facebook had tightened its privacy rules in 2014-15.
Zuckerberg featured in one email exchange from 2012 in which he mulled selling the information to developers.
The emails feature in a lawsuit iled against Facebook in a California court by the now-defunct US app developer Six4three.
They were sealed by the presiding judge but seized by the British committee under a never-before used parliamentary enforcement procedure last month.
Zuckerberg said he was writing because he did not want the emails to “misrepresent our actions or motives”.
“Like any organisation, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas,” Zuckerberg said in a message posted on Facebook.
He did not directly address Facebook’s apparent decision to give some of the world’s most popular apps special access to friends lists and other personal information that many people want to keep private.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
But he added: “To be clear, that’s different from selling people’s data. We’ve never sold anyone’s data.” The UK parliamentary committee headed by Damian Collins − a member of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party − calls the policy of giving apps privileged information about users “whitelisting”.
“Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data,” Collins wrote in a note accompanying the emails.