Yahoo Finance Facebook's 'leaked' internal memos reveal 2013 privacy issue
A cache of documents, which appear to be internal emails between Facebook executives, have been released online anonymously, seeming to suggest a near-miss on another privacy scandal in 2013.
The files were released on developer site Github on Friday. They appear to be from the same set of internal documents that were seized and published by parliament in December as part of its "fake news" inquiry, although The Daily Telegraph could not verify their authenticity.
In an email between senior Facebook employees, Mike Vernal, then vice president of product and engineering at the social network, appeared to share findings about a third party app, asking his colleagues to "follow up on this particular app and make sure what it's doing is clear and not deceptive".
He said they should make sure that the work they were doing on an update would have "unequivocally solved this issue".
"If not clear, the above interaction could have been near-fatal for Facebook Platform / Login etc. If Mark had accidentally disclosed earnings ahead of time because a platform app violated his privacy... literally, that would have basically been fatal for Login / Open Graph," he said.
“I want us to follow-up on this and respond urgently here, but I also do not want this story spreading inside of Facebook or off of this thread at all. I can't tell you how terrible this would have been for all of us had this not been caught quickly."
A spokesperson for Facebook said: “Like the other documents that were cherrypicked and released in violation of a court order last year, these by design tell one side of a story and omit important context.
"As we’ve said, these selective leaks came from a lawsuit where Six4Three, the creators of an app known as Pikinis, hoped to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app’s users. These documents have been sealed by a Californian court so we're not able to discuss them in detail.”
Other emails in the latest cache appeared to suggest the social network had been working on how it could allow advertisers to target specific users, to potentially be used by political actors.
Marne Lynn Levine, who was at the time Facebook's vice president of global public policy and is now COO at Instagram, appears to have said that Facebook "revised our policy to allow advertisers to target users who haven't indicated that they are 'married' or 'in a relationship' (instead of only allowing targeting of 'single' users)".
“This targeting capability is only currently available for dating, but the ads product team is working to expand it to other verticals (like political) and make it available via self-serve.”
Over the past year, Facebook has taken steps to bolster transparency in political ads, after it came under fire for how misinformation was spread on its platform during the 2016 US elections by Russia-linked groups.
The release of the latest documents comes around two months after Damian Collins, the chairman the House of Commons' Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, released a cache of documents which were created as part of a lawsuit by Six4Three against Facebook and its changes to its data access policies in 2015.
They had originally been sealed by a California court, but the documents were obtained and published by Mr Collins using a rare parliamentary mechanism.
In the earlier, redacted, documents, it emerged that Facebook had cut off rivals' access to data if they threatened its business model, saying it would "not allow" them access if they "do not want to participate in the ecosystem we have created".
