The release comes as part of a lawsuit by Six4Three, a small developer, against Facebook. Six4Three sued Facebook after the 2015 changes effectively eliminated the access that Six4Three’s app, called Pinkini, needed to operate.
In a statement Wednesday, Facebook called the case “baseless” and said the email documents “are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context.”
“We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends’ data with developers. Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform. But the facts are clear: We’ve never sold people’s data,” the statement said.
According to Collins, the Facebook emails show it aggressively went after competitor apps, “with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business.” At the same time, the emails appear to show Facebook accommodated large companies that could become paying customers.
The emails also indicate that Zuckerberg considered charging for data access at least as far back as 2012. An email from Zuckerberg on Oct. 7, 2012, five months after the company went public, spelled out some possibilities for charging developers:
I’ve been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend…if we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea is that any other revenue you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you own us for using plaform. For most developers this would probably cover cost completely. So instead of every paying us directly, they’d just use our payments or ads products. A basic model could be:
Facebook maintains that it never sells user data, but many data-privacy advocates say the distinction between selling data and charging companies to access users based on their data is a rather fine line for practical purposes.
CNET’s Dan Patterson and CBS News’ Graham Kates contributed reporting.
