Facebook‘s parent company Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to peer at its user DMs ‘for nearly a decade’ to help the streaming giant better tailor content for its own users, an explosive lawsuit has alleged.
Court documents unsealed on March 23 that were filed last April as part of a major anti-trust lawsuit against Meta appear to have exposed the intricate relationship between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest players.
The class-action lawsuit, filed by two US citizens, Maximilian Klein and Sarah Grabert, alleged Netflix and Facebook ‘enjoyed a special relationship’, with the social media platform giving the streaming site ‘bespoke access’ to user data.
The two Silicon Valley players also agreed to ‘custom partnerships and integrations that helped supercharge Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking models’ from at least 2011, thanks to the personal relationship between Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Lawyers alleged that ‘within a month’ of Hastings joining Facebook’s board of directors, the two companies signed an ‘Inbox API’ (Application Programming Interface) agreement that ‘allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s user’s private message inboxes.’
Hellbound and Down 