By Danica Kirka
LONDON (AP) --A U.K. Parliament committee accused Facebook on Wednesday of cutting special deals with some advertisers to give them more access to data as it released 250 pages worth of documents on the tech giant's internal discussions about the value of users' personal information.
Parliament's media committee seized confidential Facebook documents from the developer of a now-defunct bikini photo searching app as part of its investigation into fake news. In a summary of key issues pertaining to the documents, the committee says Facebook "whitelisted" or gave preferential access to certain companies, such as Airbnb and Netflix, even after the tech giant announced changes in 2015 to end access to a user's "friends."
"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," the committee said in a statement preceding the emails. "It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not."
The parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee received the documents from app developer Six4Three, which had acquired the files dating from 2013-2014, as part of a U.S. lawsuit against the social media giant. The app developer is suing Facebook over a change to the social network's privacy policies in 2015 that led Six4Three to shut down its app, Pikinis, which let users find photos of their friends in bathing suits by searching their friends list.
The committee's seizure of the documents, which were under seal by a court in the United States, came after the CEO of Six4Three, Theodore Kramer, was threatened with arrest while on a business trip to London if he didn't hand over the material. The committee chair, Damian Collins, said the documents are relevant to his ongoing investigation into whether social media platforms were used to manipulate elections.
"(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," he said. "We don't feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents."
The cache includes emails from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other key members of his staff. Collins said the emails raise important issues, particularly around the use of the data of Facebook users.
"The idea of linking access to friends' data to the financial value of the developers' relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents," Collins said.
The summary said the documents also show Facebook knew that an update to its Android mobile app phone system — which enabled the Facebook app to collect user call logs — 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 summary said.
Facebook responded quickly, saying the release was misleading without context and that the documents "are only part of the story."
"We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends' data with developers," the company said in a statement. "Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform. But the facts are clear: we've never sold people's data."
The documents suggest robust internal discussions about linking data to revenue.
"There's a big question on where we get the revenue from," Zuckerberg said in one email. "Do we make it easy for devs to use our payments/ad network but not require them? Do we require them? Do we just charge a rev share directly and let devs who use them get a credit against what they owe us? It's not at all clear to me here that we have a model that will actually make us the revenue we want at scale."
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More