Redaction ineptitude reveals Facebook's 2012 plan to sell Graph API access to user data for $250,000

Six4three sucks at redaction: its court filing in its lawsuit against Facebook (previously) was redacted by drawing black rectangles over the text, which can still be copied and pasted to read it. This is a stupid mistake that most people stopped making a decade ago.

The unredacted text reveals that in 2012 Facebook planned to market access to its Graph API for $250,000; it also provided access to the API to Nissan and Royal Bank of Canada (these two were previously known to have accessed the API) as well as Chrysler/Fiat, Lyft, Airbnb, and Netflix (these are revealed through the botched redaction).

Six4Three lawyer David Godkin has not responded to Ars’ request for comment. But he did file an 18-page document on February 9, 2017, that lambasted the deals with these companies.

“In each of these cases, Facebook seems to base its decision to grant or deny these companies an unfair competitive advantage based on its ability to extract payment or other valuable consideration,” he wrote in the redacted portions of the 2017 filing.

In a footnote on the final page, he concluded:

“Buyers who would not meet the arbitrary minimum requirements set by Facebook were shut out of the market, as was the case with Plaintiff, since it could not afford to spend $250,000 per year on unrelated advertising expenses with Facebook. Plaintiff’s annual advertising budget was far lower than this arbitrary minimum.”

Facebook pondered, for a time, selling access to user data [Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica]