It’s emerged that Netflix was the beneficiary of a sweetheart deal with Facebook that saw the social media site give special access to its data for select companies.
The information was released in almost 250 pages of internal memos seized from a tech firm that is suing Facebook.
“I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important questions about how Facebook treats user’s data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market,” said Damian Collins, chair of the parliamentary media select committee, as part of its inquiry into fake news.
I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. 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.
— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) December 5, 2018
The firms, which also included Airbnb and Lyft were also able to garner information from Facebook users beyond 2014, when the practice of obtaining information from the friends of users was said to have been ruled out.
An email sent by Netflix in February 2015 said: ‘We will be whitelisted for getting all friends, not just connected friends’
The papers also detail the relationship between Facebook and app providers with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg apparently signing off a decision to remove Twitter’s Vine video app’s ability to find friends via Facebook.
Vine closed in 2016.
Facebook says that when presented in isolation the documents are “very misleading without additional context”.
