Facebook fears thousands of internal documents will be leaked

FACEBOOK fears that the confidential internal documents published by Parliament earlier this week may only be a fraction of what has been leaked.

Lawyers for the social media giant told a California judge that they still did not know what other material might now be in circulation and might soon be released.

The emails and memos, seized last month by MPS from an American app developer, Ted Kramer, and published on Wednesday, are part of a legal archive thought to include hundreds of thousands of documents.

“We literally don’t know what information is out there,” said Sonal Mehta, counsel for Facebook in court yesterday. “We have 250 pages that we know are public because they were published this week ... but Mr Kramer can’t tell us what else is out there or who else might have it.”

The documents were gathered as part of an ongoing lawsuit by Mr Kramer’s defunct app company, Six4three, and had been sealed from the public by order of the judge.

Among them were emails showing that Facebook tried to strangle its competitors by cutting off their access to its data, as well as emails in which Facebook employees discussed how to read users’ mobile phone logs without prompting a dialogue box asking for their consent.

Mr Kramer says that he “panicked” into handing over the documents in during a visit to the UK when Damian Collins MP, head of the House of Commons committee investigating Facebook, threatened him with jail. But Facebook accuses Mr Kramer of deliberately leaking the documents as part of a “longstanding plan” to circumvent the court order and “leak information to the press”.

The company’s lawyers have sought to control the extent of the leak, last week convincing the judge to seize Mr Kramer’s laptop, his mobile devices and his cloud storage accounts for forensic analysis.

Jack Russo, counsel for Mr Kramer, denied the allegations, saying that “there was no plan” and that Mr Kramer was “subject to circumstances that took him completely by surprise”.

Prompted by a judge as to why Mr Kramer had told Mr Collins in an earlier email that he possessed documents that were “relevant” to the inquiry, Mr Russo said his client would answer the judge’s questions under oath.