Zuckerberg’s Early Notes on Privacy Now Haunt Facebook in Suit

The notebooks “address issues that lie at the core of this case: did Facebook, at Mark Zuckerberg’s direction, subvert its privacy promises to users in order to monetize the data they provided?” according to the filing. “Such thoughts are not academic here. Zuckerberg has been at the forefront of the campaign to assure users that Facebook cares about privacy.”

In response, Facebook noted that Levy reported that Zuckerberg said he destroyed the notebooks on the advice of lawyers who envisioned them becoming potential evidence in future lawsuits. The company went on to argue that while some notebooks may still exist, any attempt to tie the issues in the lawsuit to what Zuckerberg thought so long ago is “not just a stretch. It’s absurd.”

“Plaintiffs’ case is not about ‘privacy’ writ large, and it is certainly not about Mr. Zuckerberg’s nascent thoughts about privacy 15 years ago,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a filing. “Plaintiffs’ claims arise out of the Cambridge Analytica events that occurred 10 years after the notebook in question was supposedly written.”

The referee appointed to sort out disputes over pretrial information sharing, known as a special master, concluded the notebooks may be relevant based on Levy’s assertion that they conveyed a “detailed version” of Zuckerberg’s “product vision,” including “a privacy ‘mixer’ that let users control who would see an item about them.”

“It is possible information related to the design of future Facebook features exists in notebooks from 2006, if not notebooks from later years,” the special master wrote in a Sept. 29 order. “In any event, Facebook is not able to assert that the Zuckerberg Notebooks are in fact not relevant without reviewing them.”

The case is In Re Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, 18-MD-02843, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).