British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court

Damian Collins chairs the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee; it was he who ordered the Parliamentary Serjeant at Arms to drag a visiting US tech executive named Ted Kramer out of his hotel to surrender his laptop to Parliament so they could see the internal Facebook documents that a US federal judge had ordered sealed.

Kramer is CEO of Six4Three, a creepy US startup whose Facebook app helped you find pictures of your friends in bikinis; when the app was neutered by a change to Facebook's API, Six4Three sued Facebook and in the course of pre-trial discovery, they were given extensive internal documents from Facebook, which the judge in the case had ordered sealed. Somehow, Collins got wind of the fact that Kramer, his laptop, and the documents were all in London, and -- having been spurned by Mark Zuckerberg, who repeatedly refused demands to appear in Parliament -- saw his change.

Now, Collins has dumped a 250 page file, hosted on Parliament's servers, which includes the documents from Kramer's laptop and Collins's summary.

The release comes despite a plea from Facebook to respect the US court order and not publish the documents.

The documents are incredibly damning. They show Facebookers at the highest level -- up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg -- conspiring to trick Android users about how much data was being gathered by an update to the Facebook app; to give certain companies "whitelisted" access to user data beyond the access the company had disclosed to its users; to explicitly productize "friends" data (that is, to allow the trick Cambridge Analytica pulled, when getting a user to grant permission to their own data also allowed a company to access their friends' data); to use the Onavo battery-monitor app to covertly gather data on which other apps users had installed; and anti-competitive targeting of partners' apps. Read the rest