U.K. Parliament Seizes Internal Facebook Documents: Guardian

(Bloomberg) -- Damian Collins, head of the parliamentary committee dealing with culture and media issues, invoked a rarely used legal power to compel the founder of a U.S. software company, Six4Three, to hand over internal Facebook documents, the Guardian reported.

• “This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation,” Collins said, according to Guardian. “We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”
• The documents are alleged to contain important information about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The newspaper said they they include confidential emails between senior executives and correspondence with CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• Six4Three obtained the documents in a legal action against Facebook, and they are subject to a California court order that forbids them from being shared or made public.
• Facebook said the materials obtained by the parliamentary committee are subject to the court order, and it has asked the committee “to refrain from reviewing them and to return them to counsel or to Facebook,” the Guardian reported.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Silver in New York at jsilver@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lauren Berry at lberry4@bloomberg.net, James Ludden

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