Facebook late last week released a string of emails that
discuss the social media giant’s internal conversation over the possibility that
some Facebook contractors were violating the company’s terms of service when
extracting data from profiles.
The documents were released due to agreement between
Facebook and the District of Columbia attorney general’s office. Facebook
originally refused the attorney general’s request for the documents to be
released as they were part of court filings in connection with the attorney
general’s lawsuit against Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica breach.
However, last week the two sides came to terms and Facebook agreed to release
redacted versions. The information contained in these emails had already been
included in court documents filed previously.
A spokesperson for DC Attorney General Karl Racine told The
Hill the office wanted the docs released “because we believe the American
people have a right to know what and when Facebook knew about its data security
weaknesses.”
“We believe this document has the potential to confuse two
different events surrounding our knowledge of Cambridge Analytica. One involved
unconfirmed reports of scraping — accessing or collecting public data from our
products using automated means — and the other involved policy violations by
Aleksandr Kogan, an app developer who sold user data to Cambridge Analytica.
This document proves the issues are separate; conflating them has the potential
to mislead people,” Facebook wrote.
Cambridge
Analytica is mentioned in the email string, but at first is not the primary
focus of the conversation. Facebook said in a blog
post that releasing the documents could cause further confusion between what
happened when researcher Aleksandr Kogan sold data on millions of Americans to
Cambridge Analytica for use in the 2016 presidential election and the data
scraping incidents.
The emails were sent between September 22, 2015 and May 9,
2106 center on whether or not companies that were scraping publicly facing data
found on Facebook profile pages were doing so in violation of Facebook’s
policies. However, Cambridge Analytica enters the conversation in December 2015
when the Guardian broke the story about that firm
Several of those involved in the email chain did believe the
data scraping companies had exceeded what was allowed. In one case the email
noted a project by the company Nation Builder that looked at a Facebook page
run by ForAmerica and create a database using the page’s 7.6 million likes to
identify people who like ForAmerica posts. This data would them be layered over
additional data points like methods of contact and interests and once a certain
critical mass is obtained that data would be compared to a separate database of
names, phone numbers, emails of 82 million conservatives, Christians and their
friends.
A Facebook employee said, “There are likely a few data policy violations here. They can’t collect information from public posts and share the information with any type of data company.”
In July the U.S. Federal Trade Commission penalized Facebook
$5 billion as punishment for what it described as deceptive privacy practices,
and imposed new restrictions on the social media giant. Facebook likewise
announced that it has agreed to the terms of the deal. At the same time the Department
of Justice officially filed a legal complaint against Facebook, accusing the
company of misrepresenting to consumers the extent to which they could control
the privacy of their data and to which Facebook made their data available to
third parties.
