Thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents were published on Wednesday, shedding new light on how the company profited from user data and grappled with rivals.
The documents were collected as part of a lawsuit involving Facebook and a developer it took action against, and subsequently leaked.
Facebook has fought vigorously against the release of the documents, arguing that they presented an unbalanced picture of the company.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-documents-executive-emails-published-six4three-court-leak-2019-11

FB LAWSUIT DOCS EXCERPTS: 

> (February 2015 email from Facebook
employee Mary Ku confirming that seven dating apps (e.g. Tinder) received special API access to
APIs so PS12N would not break their apps, effectively carving up the entire dating market for 7
companies that made exorbitant neko ad purchases since 2012) 

(January 2015
> engineering task with the subject “‘Apps Others Use’ privacy permissions do not persist after
turning Platform off/on.’” The task was created in October 2014, identifying an issue that at first

> DECLARATION OF DAVID S. GODKIN IN OPPOSITION TO
DEFENDANTS’ SPECIAL MOTIONS TO STRIKE (ANTI-SLAPP) / Case No. CIV 533328
appears to be a bug but then Facebook employees note that the Platform team may have had “good reasons” for architecting the Apps Others Use system this way. The issue was never addressed in more than 18 months) is attached hereto as Exhibit 194.

> (April 2015 chat string in
which Facebook employee Connie Yang notes that when she sets a photo to “Only Me,” meaning
that only Yang is supposed to be able to view the photo, Facebook does not send that information
to developers and so Yang’s photo is visible by others in the developers’ app, violating her stated
privacy preference that others should not be able to see the photo. Yang asks: “isn’t this directly
violating what we tell users is ‘Only Me’?” O’Neil responds that the privacy settings were
designed in this manner because it benefits apps like Tinder, and that this is not in fact a bug)

> Cross writes: “If I use The Guardian’s app, in the GDP I can set my reads to be visible to
only me. However, the app can’t see this setting and makes my reads visible to my other friends
who use the app within the app’s UI. They’re getting complaints about this – users expect the
privacy setting they set in the GDP to be respected in the app. Do we plan to make an action’s
privacy settings visible via the API? How should partners deal with this case?” From at least 2011
through 2015 Facebook deliberately managed its Apps Others Use privacy settings in a manner
that made it impossible for developers to respect user privacy; senior Facebook employees were
aware of this issue for at least 4 years and deliberately failed to correct it

etc 


https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20191104-facebook-leaked-documents/assets/facebook-sealed-exhibits.pdf