Data gathered from millions of individual users was apparently handed out as gifts at Facebook.
In a new leak published by NBC, it was determined that Facebook did not sell data to third-party companies or advertisers. Instead, that data was shared with “app developers who were considered personal ‘friends’ of Zuckerberg.” The same privilege was extended to third-party advertisers or businesses that spent money at Facebook and “shared their own personal data.”
Facebook stands by its statement, that it did not “sell users’ personal data.” While it does not deny that data was traded for as a perk for either being a valued Facebook customer or a friend of Zuckerberg, it claimed the 4,000 leaked documents were “cherry-picked.”
The documents were a part of a lawsuit in California that followed Facebook’s policies between the years 2011 and 2015. The lawsuit took place in 2015 between Facebook and the tech startup company Six4Three, which had an app Facebook removed from its platform. Facebook claimed the startup was cut off because of a policy which was implemented in 2015, preventing users from sharing their friends’ information with third party companies.
Facebook was also discussing and heavily considering selling user data to third party advertisers. According to NBC, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg, and other high-ranking executives were all in on these discussions and even supported the idea.\
The plan was to make money to compensate for Facebook’s declining stock price. Execs were scrambling to fill in missing revenue, and the proposition to sell data was introduced fairly early in the process.
This is yet another disturbing puzzle piece that fits into Facebook’s overall blossoming privacy scandals. Those have revealed 540 million users’ data on Amazon Cloud and left millions of passwords exposed to the public and to the Facebook staff.
