For nearly 10 years, Facebook has quietly sold user messages to Netflix, helping the on-demand television viewing service understand customer habits and preferences.
The publicly available court documents belong to a class action lawsuit targeting the monopoly of Meta – Facebook’s parent company. The plaintiffs accused Netflix and Facebook of having a “special relationship” where the social media platform gave the streaming platform “private access” to user data.
Thanks to the personal relationship between Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the two companies have a “customization and collaboration agreement that enhances Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking model.” at least since 2011 until now.
Accordingly, the lawyers accused the two companies of having an agreement on the “Inbox Application Programming Interface (API)”, allowing Netflix to access the private message boxes of Facebook users. API is a set of definitions and protocols that allows two or more software and applications to communicate and share information with each other. The API acts as a bridge between applications, for example a weather application can use the API to access the forecast data of a weather website.
Deals like those of Facebook and Netflix are common in Silicon Valley.
In return, Netflix will provide reports twice a week on how users interact with the platform, such as favorite movies, number of times selecting movies from the recommendation list, etc.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Netflix as part of this relationship. In 2017 alone, Netflix spent more than 150 million USD to buy advertising on Facebook.
Notably, since April 2016, Facebook announced the launch of end-to-end encryption for messages on Messenger, but did not enable it by default. It won’t be until August 2022 that this social network will make end-to-end encryption the default for global users.
However, the lawsuit accuses Facebook of still allowing certain partners, including Netflix, to read users’ private messages.
Meta’s representative denied accusations that Facebook allowed Netflix to read user messages. “Meta does not share any of its users’ private messages with Netflix. Partnership agreements between Facebook and Netflix are very common in the industry.”
Previously, in 2018 sheet The New York Times Citing internal Facebook documents, it shows that the platform has licensed Netflix and Spotify to access users’ personal messages.
The news site also asserted that Facebook profited hundreds of millions of dollars by selling user message content to third parties.
Meta, along with much of Silicon Valley, was forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines over its handling of private user data.
In 2022, Ireland fined Meta 265 million Euros after data of more than half a billion users was posted online, including full names, phone numbers, locations and dates of birth of accounts during the period 2018-2019.
In the same year, the social networking giant also had to pay 725 million USD to settle a scandal involving Cambridge Analytica – a social media technology company in the UK, involved in the campaigns for Brexit votes and the 2016 US election. .
Facebook’s former chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, said in 2018 that up to 87 million Facebook users had their data illegally shared with Cambridge Analytica, 37 million more than the initial estimate of 50 million.