The piles of leaked documents, which directly reference the company's questionable position on competition, are likely to be extremely helpful to the dozens of entities currently investigating Facebook on antitrust grounds.
The petition alleges Facebook failed to respond to repeated subpoenas and other legal requests for information related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Six4Three, long since defunct, basically operated an unmemorable app that scraped Facebook looking for pictures of women in bikinis.
The suit itself got even more strange from there, but the cache of documentation took on something of a life of its own.
The documents have leaked in smaller chunks through the past year, revealing that Facebook not only engaged in extensive lobbying against privacy protection laws in the EU but also considered selling access to user data.
The full trove of files was eventually leaked to UK journalist Duncan Campbell, who shared the files with NBC News and a handful of other outlets earlier this year.
Internal communications reveal that Facebook ultimately tied the change to a revision of another product: Facebook Login.
In particular, using data a company such as Facebook collects from one arm of the business to prevent competitors from arising to challenge other arms of the business is the sort of behavior that antitrust regulators are getting out their metaphorical magnifying glasses to investigate in depth.Original article