Did Netflix conspire with Facebook to steal your private messages in Messenger ?

© Meta

It all starts with a class action against Meta, and a disturbing piece of information spotted through an austere quantity of documents linked to the crime. affair. We discover very problematic links between what was then Facebook and the Netflix company. In 2011, Reed Hastings, CEO of the streaming platform, joined Facebook's board of directors.

However, as early as 2013, the two firms began to exchange very sensitive information about Facebook users against a backdrop of what appears to be greed and a clear lack of moral restraints on the part of Facebook management. While in France, for example, the law protects the secrecy of private correspondence, and the Facebook Messenger messaging system is a priori one of the vehicles for this type of correspondence, Netflix would have for a certain time had access to all private messages from service users – without their knowledge.

Netflix and Facebook schemed to read your private messages

An extract from the documents of this class action taken by the tweeter Deedy explains in fact: “One month [after Reed Hastings took office at Facebook, editor's note], Netflix announced a Facebook integration allowing user metrics to be shared internally, and the firm began lobbying Congress to authorize this type of sharing in the United States.

The document continues: “as early as 2013, Netflix entered into a series of agreements called Facebook Extended API, which included an Inbox API [an API access to inboxes, editor's note], agreement which authorized Netflix to access programmatic to private inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would provide Facebook with a written report every two weeks showing the log breakdowns of recommendations sent and clicks of recipients by interface, initiation surface and/or implementation variants (including recipients who are Facebook members or not).

Later , in August 2013, “Facebook gave Netflix access ‘Titan API’ a non-public API giving a whitelist of partners access to, among other things, users' Facebook messaging application and their non-public friends on the app. To make matters worse, everything was strictly confidential: “each Extended API agreement was supposed to remain confidential, which covered ‘the very existence and content of the Extended API'”.

The full text of the complaint (in English) filed on May 31, 2023 and still ongoing, can be consulted by clicking here. The information, quite shocking and potentially serious, seems not to have surfaced for several months. We can imagine that the European Commission, the CNIL and several of its counterparts across the region will look closely at this new revelation about Meta over the coming weeks.

Even if it is true that at this stage, due to Facebook's repeated abuse of this type of sensitive information with disregard for the consequences, there is little chance that this damning new information on Mark Zuckerberg's social network will really shock many people. It is unclear how long this data sharing lasted, or whether data access of this type by Netflix is ​​still possible.

• A secret agreement was reached between Facebook and Netflix following the arrival of Reed Hastings on the board of directors of the social network.
• Celui- this, completely confidential, is revealed on the sidelines of a class action.
• We discover how for an indefinite period Netflix had access to the private messages of users of Facebook and its messaging system.

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