Facebook emails show it explored selling data
Company says it considered 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 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 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 the personal data of Facebook users and their friends 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.”
Last week, Collins announced he planned to release the emails after forcing Ted Kramer, the founder of
Six4Three, to hand them over during a business trip to London. On Friday, California Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope ordered Kramer to turn over his laptop to a forensic expert after Kramer admitted he had turned over the Facebook documents to lawmakers.
“I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important ques- tions about how Facebook treats users data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
Among the details in the Facebook emails:
❚ Facebook staffers explored how to use access to Facebook users’ data to get companies to spend more on advertising. In 2012, Facebook staffers debated removing restrictions on user data for developers who spent $250,000 or more on ads.
Facebook’s response: “We explored multiple ways to build a sustainable business with developers who were building apps that were useful to people. ... We ultimately settled on a model where developers did not need to purchase advertising.”
❚ When competitor Twitter launched Vine in 2013, Facebook shut down access to keep the mobile video app from growing through friends on the platform and competing with Instagram, which it owns. “Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR,” Facebook executive Justin Osofsky wrote to Zuckerberg. “Yup, go for it,” Zuckerberg replied.
Facebook’s response: “We built our developer platform years ago to pave the way for innovation in social apps and services. At that time we made the decision to restrict apps built on top of our platform that replicated our core functionality. These kind of restrictions are common across the tech industry.”
❚ In 2015, the company began uploading call and text logs from Android phones. Collins’ committee says Facebook tried to make it “as hard as possible” for users to understand that their calls and texts would be collected. At the time, a Facebook engineer said the practice was a “high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.” The data offered a comprehensive look into how users communicated on their mobile devices.
Facebook’s response: The company says it allowed Facebook users to opt into giving the social network access to their call and text logs.
❚ Facebook used its security app, Onavo, to gather information on how many people used certain apps and how often they used them to help Facebook decide which companies it should acquire, including messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion, and which to view as a competitive threat.
Facebook’s response: “We’ve always been clear when people download Onavo about the information that is collected and how it is used, including by Facebook. ... People can opt-out via the control in their settings and their data won’t be used for anything other than to provide, improve and develop Onavo products and services.”