Facebook eyed charging companies for user data access, report says

FILE - This Feb. 19, 2014, file photo, shows a Facebook app icon on a smartphone in New York. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison, File)

Facebook considered charging companies for access to the data of its 2.27 billion monthly active users, according to leaked internal emails.

The emails, which were contained in an unredacted court document provided to The Wall Street Journal, come from the Six4Three cache seized by the UK government a few days ago. Six4Three, which developed an app allowing users to search through their friends' Facebook photos for images of their friends in bikinis, sued Facebook in 2015, claiming its data policies were anticompetitive.

The Journal points to 2013 discussions with Amazon, whereby Facebook says it will soon provide the retailer with less access to user data unless it can have a "strategic conversation in the context of the broader deal discussions." Amazon denied using that info for any nefarious purposes.

Similarly, a Facebook employee asked internally whether the Royal Bank of Canada had an agreement about how much it would spend on advertising each year. An RBC spokesperson told the Journal that the bank "never had a minimum marketing spend or target agreement with Facebook."

Most of the documents are dated between 2012 and 2014, but are "far from conclusive, lacking context and in some cases truncated," according to the Journal.

Facebook confirmed to the paper that it discussed charging for data but said it decided against it. "The documents Six4Three gathered for this baseless case are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context," according to Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's director of developer platforms and programs.

The documents are currently under seal; Richard Allan, VP of Policy Solutions at Facebook, criticized Six4Three as a "hostile litigant" and said the documents are not to be trusted.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.