Facebook allegedly gave Netflix access to users’ private messages, according to US court filings.
Facebook’s parent company Meta and streaming giant Netflix have once again found themselves in court. According to documents submitted to the court, Netflix read Facebook users’ private messages and shared data with Facebook in return.
The lawsuit, filed by two US citizens, Maxiillian Klein and Sarah Grabert, alleged that Facebook and Netflix were “enjoying an exclusive relationship” and that the social media giant gave the streaming giant “unspoken access” to user data. The two major Silicon Valley players were also alleged to be “exclusive partners in the over-development of Facebook’s ad targeting and rating models.”
It’s called a “private message” but they made it read.
At the center of these allegations is Reed Hastings, who is also known to have close relations with Mark Zuckerberg. Hastings is one of the founders of Netflix and has a seat on Facebook’s board of directors. According to the lawyers’ claim, after Hastings joined Facebook, the message boxes of Facebook users were opened to Netflix with the Inbox API developed by the two companies.
In return, Netflix, which offers more personalized content with the information it obtained, shared data on its users’ interactions with the platform every 14 days to Facebook.
It would not be surprising if Meta and Netflix are fined in this case. Technology giants are now used to these penalties at this point. Platforms that constantly seek agreements with a number of legal authorities do not hesitate to pay large sums. For example, Meta paid a 265 million euro data leakage fine to Ireland in 2022. In the same year, they agreed to pay a $725 million fine for data collected in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk
