Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit
arstechnica.com
Facebook Watch, Netflix were allegedly bigger competitors than they let on.

in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    161·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The streaming business’ demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs.

    The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case.

    One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision.

    By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

    Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December.

    The company told Gizmodo that it has standard agreements with Netflix currently but didn’t answer the publication’s specific questions.

    The original article contains 487 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!