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The UK Parliament has obtained a series of internal Facebook documents that the social media giant has been fighting for months to prevent its disclosure, according to Facebook and a lawyer involved in a lawsuit against the company.
The cache of documents, some of which may include correspondence between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and corporate executives, comes from a lawsuit in California that describes a litany of allegations against Facebook, including allegations of no -respect of the privacy of the user and Facebook. The CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has come up with a system that has forced Facebook rivals, or potential rivals, to disappear.
"We affirm that Facebook itself is the biggest data abuser abuser in the history of the software industry," said Ted Kramer, owner of Six4Three, the company that pursues Facebook , in an interview with CNN this summer.
Kramer told CNN that he wanted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the US Attorneys General to investigate the allegations made by Six4Three.
A Facebook spokesman told CNN on Saturday that the Six4Three lawsuit was unfounded.
The internal documents were obtained by Kramer's lawyers during a preliminary interrogation, a legal process allowing one party to a prosecution to obtain evidence from the other.
The San Mateo Superior Court in California has ordered that the documents remain under seal, which means that they should not be made public by Six4Three.
However, last Monday, MP Damian Collins, chairman of the British parliamentary committee interested in Facebook, wrote to Ted Kramer of Six4Three to request the documents.
Kramer was apparently in the UK for work and the letter was sent to the central London hotel where he was staying, court documents reviewed by CNN.
Facebook contacted the California court when it became aware of Collins' claim. On Tuesday, the judge in charge of the case ordered that no unredacted copies of the relevant sealed documents be issued until further order of the court, and that "non-compliance with this provision will be considered as an act of outrage ".
On Friday night, Stuart Gross, one of Six4Three's lawyers, confirmed to CNN that the British committee had obtained Six4Three's sealed documents. It is not known when the documents were obtained. Gross said Six4Three had asked the committee to "refrain from reviewing them and sending them to the lawyer or Facebook".
A spokesman for Facebook said in a statement that the documents obtained by the committee were subject to a court order of protection limiting their disclosure.
On Saturday night, The Observer newspaper in London reported that the documents had been seized after Kramer had been escorted to Parliament after the appearance of a Sergeant-at-Arms at the Kramer Hotel. Kramer was told that he risked fines and imprisonment if he did not return the documents. CNN has not confirmed this independently.
The legal fight
Six4Three, who is engaged in a multi-year legal battle with Facebook, is behind "Pinkini", a controversial application that allowed users to find pictures of their friends wearing bikinis.
The application did not violate Facebook's general terms and conditions when it was published in 2013. But in 2015, Facebook changed its policy on sharing user information with third-party application developers, such as behind Pinkini.
Prior to the change, Pinkini and other app developers had access to information not only about their users, but also about their Facebook friends, including their photos.
When Facebook limited access to the data of friends, it destroyed Pinkini's businesses, according to Six4Three.
While a rude application that was looking for bikini photos and that had been closed several years ago could not be remarkable in itself, the fact that Six4Three has access to Facebook's internal documents – currently under the seal of the Court – it is.
This little-known case attracted the interest of major media outlets, including CNN and The Guardian, which filed a joint court application in June for the documents to be made public.
The motion referred to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which also dealt with Facebook's previous practice of allowing applications to access user friend data, and argued: "(G) Because of the rage that is rightly surrounding the controversy Cambridge Analytica, the public has a keen interest in understanding the facts surrounding Facebook's data practices over time. "
"The Guardian and CNN express no opinion on the merits of the dispute," the petition added.
This request, as well as other motions to release all documents, were rejected by the court in October.
Facebook's pushback
Facebook has always rejected the claims of Six4Three.
"Before the case was handled by CNN, the biggest achievement of this application was named" one of the scariest applications of all time, "said Natalie Naugle, associate general counsel of Facebook, in charge of litigation, in a statement delivered to CNN in October. "Its creators have marketed the application to look at photos of women in bikini.We made changes to the platform in 2014 and we do not regret not that it limits access to Six4Three's information. "
Also in October, a Facebook spokesperson provided CNN with a link to a 2013 Pinkini promotional video stating that the company was doing so "so your viewers have a clear picture of what Six4Three is trying to defend" . Facebook also said that the application Pinkini had less than 4,500 downloads.
Naugle, Facebook's lawyer, told CNN in a statement last month that the company was maintaining its decision to request that documents be kept under seal. "Seal motions are quite common in litigation and are generally granted to respect the confidentiality of internal discussions and the trade secrets that their disclosure may reveal. We believe that Six4Three's claims are entirely unfounded, "she said.
S addressing CNN during the summer, Kramer has described as terrifying the portrait of Pinkini by Facebook. He said the application was a way for his company to gather a user base and develop its "sophisticated algorithms for visual form recognition". The ultimate goal of the company, he said, was to "develop a business that allows you to look at photos and able to buy clothes while looking at an image. "
Kramer told CNN that he viewed his fight with Facebook as a "David vs. Goliath" fight.
"I think it's really important to understand that they fought body and soul to prevent disclosure of this evidence, which the world should see. We believe that everyone should see this evidence because they have the right to know the truth, "he said.
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