7000 pages of internal file exposure, Zuckerberg uses user data as a chip to fight opponents
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “New Witness” (ID: AI_era), source synthesis of theverge, arstechnica, etc., edited Xiao Qin.
Guide: Facebook is facing an unprecedented crisis: nearly 7,000 pages of confidential documents have been leaked, revealing how Facebook uses user data as a bargaining chip, how to control competitors, and even incubating Kill the competitor before. What do you think of Facebook’s practices?
Facebook is facing an unprecedented crisis: nearly 7,000 pages of confidential confidential documents have been leaked, revealing how Facebook uses user data as a bargaining chip to consolidate the dominance of the social giant, how to plan to monitor the location of Android users, how to control competition Opponents, even killing competitors before hatching.
NBC News obtained these documents and made them public. The leaked documents totaled about 7,000 pages, of which about 4,000 pages were Facebook internal communications, such as emails, web chats, notes, presentations, and spreadsheets, with a timeframe ranging from 2011 to 2015. Approximately 1200 pages are marked as “highly confidential.”
Leaked files home page
These leaked documents came from a long-term lawsuit involving a company called Six4Three and Facebook. Let’s review history:
In the past, there was a terrible company called Six4Three. It has developed an app called Pikinis that finds photos of your friends wearing swimsuits on Facebook and organizes them together. This app can be said to be a vivid manifestation of the abuse of the Facebook developer platform, so in the third-party developers in 2014 and 2015, Facebook closed the company’s API access.
Six4THree has long since disbanded, and people’s memories of Pikinis may have faded, but the company’s founder, Ted Kramer, decided in 2015 to sue Facebook for alleged breaches of contracts and “fraudulent and anti-competitive programs.” For four years, the lawsuit continues, and it could be one of the strangest cases in Silicon Valley history. Its main argument is that Facebook uses its control over personal information to undermine competition.
Evenly, if the case does not provide thousands of pages of legal findings that reflect Facebook executives’ perceptions of competition, then we may not hear too much about the case.
NBC News summarizes it:
Overall, these documents show how Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and his board and management team are trying to figure out how to use Facebook users’ data—including friends, relationships, and photos—as a partner company. Negotiation chips. In some cases, Facebook rewards some partners in a way that allows them to preferentially access certain types of user data, without allowing competitors to obtain such privileges.
For example, Facebook allows Amazon to access user data because it advertises on Facebook. In another case, the message application MessageMe was banned from accessing data because it was so popular that it might compete with Facebook.
The
file shows that Facebook plans to publicly address these initiatives to protect user privacy.
Six4Three’s pdf files for testimony, emails, presentations and other evidence on Facebook litigation, including:
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Sealed exhibits (3,799 pages, 600MB)
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Exhibits (2,737 pages, 50MB)
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Notes and summaries of the exhibits (415 pages, 2MB)
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Memorandum (20 pages, .1MB)
Switcharoo plans to expose: Named to protect privacy, it really suppresses competitors
From the above summary, we already know the general content described in these documents. Facebook has givenDevelopers have a very wide range of permissions, which helps to enhance the company’s interests and stimulate its development; it will bargain with developers while meeting developer needs; then, as Facebook becomes dominant, its data practices The review is also increasing, and it gradually reduces the permissions that developers can access.
These files seem to confirm two long-standing doubts about Facebook. First, it treats user privacy as a bargaining chip. Second, it does nothing to prevent competitors from becoming too powerful.
One piece of evidence for exposure is the “Switcharoo” program:
The internal emails contained in the California court documents show that some of Facebook’s executives seem to be calling the “Switcharoo Plan” for privacy changes.
The Switcharoo program has proven to be an idea for Facebook executives to try to abandon the various APIs their development partners rely on, fearing that these developers will one day compete directly with Facebook and publicly announce that these changes are intended to promote privacy protection.
Reuters report said:
As thousands of developers lost access to user data, executives decided to publicly announce these changes. They chose to bundle their updates called “PS12N” to an unrelated update to the Facebook login system, which gives users greater control over their privacy.
An executive wrote in an email that the “narration” of the announcement would “focus on quality and user experience, which could provide a good umbrella for some objections to the API.”
Another executive invited a colleague to review the “Switcharoo Project” in an e-mail in February 2014, calling it a “compromise” that could “tell a meaningful story.”
Unscrupulously killing competitors, opaque “white list”
Facebook executives’ emails in 2013 show that the company plans to divide its own applications and services into three categories: current competition, potential future competition, and “we’re aligned with business models.Developer.”
A series of email exchanges since 2013 also discussed in detail Facebook’s choice to ban potential competitors from advertising on their apps. Executives have had a long debate on the question of who is eligible to be a competitor.
In the end, the company leadership seems to have decided that the Messenger application is more threatening than other types of services.
“I think we should block WeChat, Kakao and Line ads,” Zuckerberg wrote in an email in 2013. “These companies are building social networks and replacing us. Advertising revenue is not important to us compared to any risk. I agree that we should use advertising to promote our own products, but I will still block those with our core. Businesses with competitive companies gain any advantage from us.”
Another series of emails in 2013 showed how the Facebook leadership is responding to new competition.
IM Messenger STARTM was founded in 2013 and was acquired by Yahoo in 2014. Facebook’s leadership initially thought that MessageMe was too much threat to the company’s competition and did not allow MessageMe to access its data.
“In the first week after launch, MessageMe didn’t actually get a call for any friends.get,” the email wrote. “However, MessageMe’s monthly active users are currently about 350,000, and last week’s number of friends reached 330,000. We will soon limit access to friends.get.”
The email also added that the company will also “look if there are other news apps recently noticed by this team, and if so, we hope to limit them at the same time.”
Facebook growth director Javier Olivan also said in the email that chat application companies are dangerous because they may “evolve into Facebook.” He also mentioned a statement from WhatsApp that said WhatsApp processed 18 billion messages in a day on December 31, 2012.
The executives are concerned about the growth of WhatsApp. In the end, Facebook spent $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp.
However, the third type of company was able to reach an agreement with Facebook to re-ensure access to user data after the API was transferred. For example, Amazon is allowed access because it puts a lot of ads on Facebook.
Facebook has whitelisted certain companies, allowing them to access user data more widely, even after the company closed its developer platform in 2014 and 2015. TechCrunch also reported in DecemberIt is unclear whether the user agrees or not, and how Facebook decides which companies should be whitelisted or not whitelisted.
Some dating apps are whitelisted
Facebook also plans to monitor the location of Android users. Citing these documents, Computer Weekly reports: “Facebook plans to use its Android app to track users’ locations, and allows advertisers to send political ads and allow dating sites to send invitations to “single” people.”
Regulators conduct antitrust investigations against Facebook, and Zuckerberg is known as the “Leverage Master”
US regulators are currently closely reviewing Facebook’s business practices. In October, New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced that 47 Attorney Generals from various states plan to participate in a New York-led antitrust investigation against Facebook. This summer, the US House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on antitrust issues in Silicon Valley, and the US Federal Trade Commission is continuing to review the company’s practices.
Zuckerberg’s strategy of exerting control over the application market during the timeframe covered by the document prompted a Facebook employee to compare the company to a villain in Game of Thrones, another Employees describe the treatment that external application developers receive as “somewhat unethical”. But Zuckerberg’s approach also won praise: the document shows that Doug Purdy, then director of Facebook products, called Zuckerberg a “master of leverage”.