"Damian Collins, a Conservative British parliamentarian who leads a committee on media and culture, made the internal documents public after demanding them last month under threat of sanction from Six4Three.The defunct app developer obtained them as part of its ongoing lawsuit in California state court alleging that Facebook violated promises to app developers when it ended their access to likes, photos and other data of users' friends in 2015.Facebook, which has described the Six4Three case as baseless, said the released communications were "selectively leaked" and it defended its practices. 'WHITELISTED' FOR ACCESS TO FRIENDS DATAThough filed under seal and redacted in the lawsuit, the internal communications needed to be made public because "they 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," Collins said on Twitter.Dating app Badoo and ride-hailing app Lyft were among other companies 'whitelisted' for access to data about users' friends, the documents https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf showed.Lyft wanted to show carpool riders their mutual friends as an "ice breaker," even if those friends were not using Lyft, according to one email. "We’ve prepared reactive PR," Osofsky wrote, to which Zuckerberg replied, "Yup, go for it. "Twitter declined to comment.Friends' data had stoked the growth of many apps because it enabled people to easily connect with Facebook buddies on a new service.Facebook weighed charging other apps for access to its developer tools, including the friends lists, if they did not buy a certain amount of advertising from Facebook, according to the emails. In one from 2012, Zuckerberg wrote that he was drawing inspiration for business models from books he had been reading about the banking industry.Facebook said it ultimately maintained free access to the tools.

Source: Egypt Today December 05, 2018 21:11 UTC