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Just when you thought that the heat of Facebook's Analytica scandal was gone, a bunch of British lawmakers burned the fire again.
MP Damian Collins hit a brick wall with numerous requests to place Facebook's president, Mark Zuckerberg, before his parliamentary committee on digital, culture, media and sport, which is holding a investigating misinformation and misinformation, to answer questions about the data debacle.
Now, Collins has in his hands documents that the CEO of Facebook might not be able to ignore – and all this comes from an application designed to look for photos of your friends in swimsuits.
Here's how Zuckerberg could be humiliated by a scary bikini app.
Facebook sued by the developer of the application bikini
Facebook is involved in a three-year legal battle with a software company called Six4Three.
Six4Three is notably accused by Facebook of having killed an application that she had created when, in 2015, the social network has profoundly changed its privacy policy, preventing application developers from accessing to the data of their friends.
The application, called Pikinis, allowed users to bring out images of their Facebook friends in bikinis or swimsuits using photo scanning technology.
The pikinis drew the attention of the press in 2013. HuffPost called it "goose bumps" and Jezebel said that it was a reason for "locking in these privacy settings". The pikinis, however, never came out of the beta and were closed in 2015.
A promotional video for the app still available on YouTube shows a man in a cafe looking at women who magically undress with a touch of his phone.
Six4Three gets potentially explosive evidence
As part of the long legal battle, Six4Three has obtained Facebook documents by discovery, "a legal process in which one party to a lawsuit can get evidence of the other," according to CNN.
Newspapers could contain explosive revelations about Facebook's privacy policy. The Observer has assumed that they could have evidence that Facebook has knowingly created an environment allowing Cambridge Analytica to collect data from nearly 87 million users.
CNN added that the documents could include correspondence between Zuckerberg and other company executives.
British lawmakers seize documents
The San Mateo County Superior Court in California has ordered that the documents remain sealed, although CNN and The Guardian filed a petition in June to make them public.
But Collins obtained them by invoking a mysterious element of British parliamentary privilege.
Collins wrote to Six4Three's founder, Ted Kramer, on November 19, asking for papers. Kramer was in the UK on business and Collins' letter was sent to his hotel in central London, according to CNN.
After refusing to hand in the documents, Kramer was escorted to Parliament, where he was informed that he was facing a fine or imprisonment if he did not produce them, said The Observer. .
The newspaper added that this process was overseen by an arms sergeant, responsible for security and maintenance of order in the House of Commons.
Some said that the case seemed rather coordinated. Editor of NBC Technical Surveys, Olivia Solon, supposed that Kramer was an accomplice because his lawyers did not "decry the overbreadth of jurisdiction".
Kramer said the documents should be published.
"I think it's really important to understand that they fought body and soul to prevent disclosure of this evidence, which we believe the whole world should see," he said. to Facebook at CNN.
The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee declined to comment.
Will the documents be published?
Despite Facebook's protests, it seems that Collins is leaning towards publication.
In an email sent Sunday night to Facebook's public policy chief, Richard Allan, Collins said the case presented a "great public interest".
Allan told Collins that the Six4Three trial was "totally baseless" and that the documents obtained by the parliamentary committee were sealed by court order.
A Facebook spokesperson said: "Facebook has never traded its data on Facebook and we have always made it clear that developer access is subject to our rules and information that people choose to share. "
In any event, things are going to go wrong on Tuesday when the committee looks at Allan in a public hearing.
How could Zuckerberg be involved?
It is difficult to say exactly how Zuckerberg could be involved, if at all, in the Six4Three case.
At the very least, this week will reopen the barely healed wounds of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which easily ranks among the worst in Facebook's history.
The mere fact that these documents are now known has sparked a new set of uncomfortable questions about Facebook's approach to privacy.
If they are published and contain evidence indicating that a company has played fast with user data, Facebook's reputation would suffer more damage and its regulatory risk would increase. If they provide a paper trail leading to Zuckerberg, the 34-year-old CEO will find himself at the center of a scandal.
During the most difficult year of his tenure, Zuckerberg was hit by a series of scandals including false news, data breaches, poor crisis management, interference in elections and inappropriate content.
The timing could not be worse.
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