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The documents posted on Friday seem to be confidential communications internal to Facebook that reveal new details about the processing of user data by the company.
About 60 pages of unwritten documents from a lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, an application developer, were posted anonymously on GitHub on Friday. They include emails between various Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a 2012 "highly confidential" memo detailing various policy issues.
The Guardian has not been able to independently confirm the authenticity of the documents, but redacted versions of some of the pieces have already been released.
"Like the other documents that were chosen and published in violation of a court decision last year, these are designed to tell a part of the story and to omit the important context, "said a spokesman for Facebook in a statement. "As we have said, these selective leaks are the result of a lawsuit. Six4Three, creators of an application called Pikinis, hoped to force Facebook to share information about the friends of its users. These documents were sealed by a California court, so we can not discuss them in detail. "
The new email cache seems to be referring to what could have been a catastrophic breach of privacy for Facebook: a near-miss in which a third-party application could have disclosed the company's financial results earlier than expected .
In a thread, the former vice president of Facebook, Michael Vernal, evokes a kind of problem with an application, pointing out that it "could have been almost fatal for the Facebook / Login / etc platform. ".
"Wow, that would have been a disaster," says Avichal Garg, former director of product management at Facebook.
"If Mark had accidentally divulged his earnings in advance because a platform application had violated his privacy … literally, that would have been fatal for Login / Open Graph / etc.," replied Vernal.
He then urged everyone on the wire to keep the confidentiality of the incident, writing: "Listen guys, do not do this story, do not repeat this story wirelessly." He added, "I'm great, super serious here. I want us to follow this and respond urgently here, but I do not want this story to spread inside Facebook or out of this thread either. I can not tell you how bad it would have been for all of us if it had not been done quickly. "
The sealed court transcripts have been at the center of a transatlantic controversy since November, when they were obtained by the British Parliament in extraordinary circumstances. Produced by Facebook during the discovery of a lawsuit filed in 2015 by Six4Three, the documents were sealed by the California State Judge, who oversaw the case.
However, when the founder of Six4Three, Ted Kramer, was in London in 2018, he provided them to Damian Collins, chairman of the parliamentary committee investigating Facebook, after Collins had told Kramer that the fact that he was not there was not the only one. to have done was a "contempt of Parliament".
The reasons why Kramer had access to the documents and to find out how he should have provided them to Collins while he was in the UK despite the court order did so. subject of considerable stigma on the part of the California court – and Facebook.
The sealed court documents have been at the center of a transatlantic controversy. Photography: Chris Jackson / Getty Images
Collins, whose committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) released Monday the results of its investigation into false information and misinformation, published a redacted selection of documents that it had obtained in December.
Another of the recently exposed documents seems to be a memo of July 2012 from Marne Levine, who was at the time the vice president of Facebook's global public policy. The eight-page memo, marked "highly confidential", offers a fascinating look at the politics of society.
In one section, Levine discusses data collection projects on Android devices. He writes, "We will collect user location data and match it to cell site IDs. This information will be stored in an anonymous form, but will allow us to deploy geo-localized "handset" products in the future. Secondly, the growth team wants to start collecting some limited information about whether users have a non-Google app store and the default apps they use for certain features. Facebook (camera, messages, etc.) for the purpose of competitive badysis and product improvement. "
Elsewhere in the memo, Levine describes in detail the efforts of various Facebook executives and employees to win the favor of politicians around the world. Levine notably celebrates a meeting between General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and Sheryl Sandberg, noting that Dempsey and his wife are "both active Facebook users." The memo also refers to a successful effort to persuade former Indian president Pranab Mukherjee to join Facebook.
The memo also refers to a meeting between a Facebook staff member and the head of the California eCrime Unit to discuss the privacy office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
"The meeting went well and we ended up with several helpful badurances about the intentions of the AG – the most important is that they consider Facebook as a good actor and that they keep open communication with us (we will not do an investigation without our knowledge), wrote Levine.
The Guardian has contacted Six4Three for a comment. Ted Kramer declined to comment.
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