MPs expose 250-page dossier of confidential Facebook emails about selling data to advertisers

Parliament's media committee seized scores of private documents from a developer as part of an  investigation into fake news – which show internal emails from Mark Zuckerberg.

Today they released the documents in full, which show the firm considered charging developers for access to their user's data.

Damian Collins, chair of the committee, said there was a "considerable public interest" in the papers and that the social media site had failed to give "straight answers".

Last week MPs from across the world were furious when CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't show up to their committee hearing on fake news – despite appearing at similar hearings in the US and the EU.

The data was secured using an obscure parliamentary rule last month, but the documents have only just been released in full.

The firm had demanded the information wasn't published – and even had a court order preventing them from being revealed in California.

"There's a big question on where we get the revenue from," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in one email.

"Do we make it easy for devs to use our payments/ad network but not require them? Do we require them? Do we just charge a rev share directly and let devs who use them get a credit against what they owe us? It's not at all clear to me here that we have a model that will actually make us the revenue we want at scale."

The media committee got the data from app developer Six4Three, which acquired the information dating back to 2013.

They are suing Facebook over changes to the social media firm's policies which led to it shutting down the app.

But Facebook said today's release was misleading and only showed part of the story.

Today  Mr Collins said: "I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents.

"We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents.

A Facebook statement said: "The documents Six4Three gathered for their baseless case 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."

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