Facebook Is Trying to Protect Bikini Photos, But It's Not Easy

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. is under fire for giving up user privacy too easily back in the day.

But an ongoing court fight in Silicon Valley shows that even after the world’s largest social network changed its policy in 2014 to protect user information from being exploited by outsiders, its power to control access to sensitive data is still hotly contested.

Photos on Facebook of you and your friends in bikinis and Speedos are safe for now, but if the makers of the Pikinis app prevail in their lawsuit, it would once again be open season for subscribers to pay a $1.99 fee to instantly locate swimsuit pictures.

The app was shut down three years ago when Facebook cut off third-party access to a back-door channel to friends’ data -- about a year after that same channel allowed a Soviet-born American researcher to gather basic profile information on millions of Facebook users and provide the data to an analytics firm that helped elect President Donald Trump.

But Six4Three LLC, the developer of Pikinis, has refused to let its business model die. It alleges that Facebook engaged in “an anti-competitive bait-and-switch scheme” that duped Six4Three and tens of thousands of other developers into making hefty investments to build apps and then decided “it would be in Facebook’s best interest to no longer compete with many developers and to shut down their businesses.”

Facebook contends the suit is bankrolled by a single investor in Six4Three seeking a $100 million windfall on a business that made little more than $400 in sales during the short-lived existence of Pikinis. The social network also says it gave developers a full year’s warning before it ended access to friends’ newsfeeds and photos.

“Facebook made -- and must continue to make -- important editorial decisions about what third party content is available through its platform to protect its users’ privacy and experience,” the company argued in a February court filing.

When Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and five other company executives were added as defendants in the case in January, they promptly moved to get the judge assigned to it kicked off, arguing she was biased against them and their lawyers. A different judge is now in charge and the docket shows a trial is still set for April 2019 in state court in Redwood City, California.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Blumberg in San Francisco at pblumberg1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.