The U.K. Parliament released about 250 pages of internal Facebook Inc. FB -2.24% emails that lawmakers said show how executives at the social-media company, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, gave some developers special access to user data and contemplated charging developers for data access.
The documents were released Wednesday as part of parliamentary procedures in the U.K. as lawmakers there examined Facebook’s use of data.
The Wall Street Journal had previously reported the company considered charging companies for continued access to user data several years ago, a step that would have marked a dramatic shift away from the social-media giant’s policy of not selling that information, citing an unredacted court document.
The internal documents provided to U.K. lawmakers initially emerged as part of a lawsuit against Facebook filed by a company called Six4Three LLC. Six4Three, the developer of a now-defunct app, sued Facebook in 2015, alleging that its data policies were anticompetitive and favored certain companies over others. The majority of the documents filed in the case have been placed under seal at Facebook’s urging and on orders from a California judge.
Facebook said in a statement the documents released Wednesday “are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context.” It called the lawsuit by Six4Three “baseless” and said “like any business, we had many of 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 documents, British parliamentarians said in a summary finding, show how Facebook recognized the financial value of user data. In one email, dated Oct. 7, 2012, Mr. Zuckerberg mused that Facebook could charge developers directly for the data.
“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,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, according to excerpts of the email released Wednesday. The summary finding of the documents was prepared by Damian Collins, chairman of the House of Commons Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
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