Facebook Data Usage

Internal Facebook documents released by a U.K. parliamentary committee offer the clearest evidence yet that the social network has used its enormous trove of user data as a competitive weapon, often in ways designed to keep its users in the dark. Facebook has been accused of cutting special deals with some app developers to give them more access to data. At the same time other potential rivals have been cut out.

Other documents showed Facebook executives discussing how company data and user data is collected. It considered quietly collecting the call records and text messages of users of phones that run on Google's Android operating system without asking their permission. More than 200 pages of documents on the tech giant's internal discussions about the value of users' personal information have been released by the U.K. committee covering the period between 2012 and 2015. It indicates the company's inner workings and the extent to which it used people's data to make money while publicly vowing to protect their privacy.

It is concerning how little users actually know about how Facebook treats their data. Facebook called the documents misleading and said the information they contain is "only part of the story." "Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform," Facebook said in a statement. "But the facts are clear: We've never sold people's data."

In a Facebook post, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg was intending to put the documents in context. "Of course, we don't let everyone develop on our platform," he wrote. "We blocked a lot of sketchy apps. We also didn't allow developers to use our platform to replicate our functionality or grow their services virally in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook." The U.K. committee got hold of the documents from app developer Six4Three, maker of a now-defunct bikini-picture search app. Six4Three acquired the files as part of a U.S. lawsuit that accuses Facebook of deceptive, anti-competitive business practices. The documents remain under court seal in the U.S.

The documents "raise important questions 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," said committee chair Damian Collins. Facebook for example collected data about the mobile apps its users favoured to help it decide which companies to acquire. It also said Facebook knew that an update to its Android mobile app phone system — which allowed the Facebook app to hoover up user call logs and text messages — would be controversial. "To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features of the upgrade of their app," the committee summary pointed out.

The documents also show Facebook would jealously safeguard its interests. In a January 2013 email exchange, Zuckerberg signed off on cutting access to Twitter's Vine video-producing app, which had allowed users to find their friends on Vine by pulling in data from Facebook. Also, a robust internal discussion about linking data to revenue could be found in the documents.