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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 through an examination for discovery, a legal process allowing one party to a prosecution to obtain evidence of 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 who looked at Facebook, wrote to Ted Kramer of Six4Three to ask for 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 he learned of Collins' request. 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 contempt of court ".
On Friday night, one of Six4Three's lawyers, Stuart Gross, 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.
The legal fight
Six4Three, who is engaged in a multi-year legal battle with Facebook, is behind "Pinkini", a controversial application that allows 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 information about its users with developers. Third-party applications, such as those behind Pinkini.
Prior to the change, Pinkini and other application developers were able to access information not only about their users, but also about their Facebook friends, including photos of their friends.
When Facebook restricted access to friend data, 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 fury rightly aroused by the Cambridge Analytica controversy, the public has a crushing 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 their case was handled by CNN, the biggest achievement of this application was described as" one of the scariest applications of all time, "said Natalie Naugle, associate general counsel of Facebook, Litigation Officer, in a statement delivered to CNN in October. "Its creators marketed the app as a way to look at photos of women in bikinis. We made changes to the platform in 2014 and we do not regret that the limited access to Six4Three's information is restricted. "
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 commonplace in litigation and are generally granted to respect the confidentiality of internal discussions and trade secrets that their disclosure may disclose." We believe that Six4Three's claims are totally unfounded. she declared.
S addressing CNN during the summer, Kramer rejected Facebook's Pinkini's portrayal as scary. 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 be able to buy clothes while looking at an image".
Kramer told CNN that he considered his fight with Facebook as a fight "David vs. Goliath".
"I think it's really important to understand that they fought body and soul to prevent disclosure of this evidence, which we believe the world should see. We believe that everyone should see this evidence because they have the right to know the truth, "he said. .
