#user data information

Meta-owned Facebook is reportedly unable to account for much of the personal user data under its ownership, including what it is being used for and where it is located, media reports say.

According to the tech website Engadget, privacy engineers on Facebook's Ad and Business Product team wrote a report last year, intending it to be read by the company's leadership.

It detailed how Facebook could address a growing number of data usage regulations, including new privacy laws in India, South Africa and elsewhere.

The report's authors described a platform often in the dark about the personal data of its estimated 1.9 billion users, citing an internal report leaked to Motherboard, the report said.

The engineers warned that Facebook would have difficulty making promises to countries on how it would treat the data of its citizens.

"We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose,'" the authors were quoted as saying.

Meta-owned Facebook is reportedly unable to account for much of the personal user data under its ownership, including what it is being used for and where it is located, media reports say.

According to the tech website Engadget, privacy engineers on Facebook's Ad and Business Product team wrote a report last year, intending it to be read by the company's leadership.

It detailed how Facebook could address a growing number of data usage regulations, including new privacy laws in India, South Africa and elsewhere.

The report's authors described a platform often in the dark about the personal data of its estimated 1.9 billion users, citing an internal report leaked to Motherboard, the report said.

The engineers warned that Facebook would have difficulty making promises to countries on how it would treat the data of its citizens.

"We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose,'" the authors were quoted as saying.

"And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation," they added.

Leaked documents from a civil suit against Facebook show how the social network aimed to employ user data as a tool for bargaining and to manipulate competitors, NBC News reported on Wednesday.

Some 7,000 pages of documents reveal how Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and his team harnessed users' personal information to reward partners by giving them preferential data, while depriving rivals of the same sort of information, it reported.

NBC said the emails, notes and other documents dated as far back as 2011 and were supposed to be kept out of the public eye pending the civil case in California.

They show, for example, how Amazon received special data access after purchasing advertising on Facebook, while an app called MessageMe was denied data after growing so large it became a competitor, NBC reported.

While acting out of self-motivation, Facebook planned to portray the moves as protective of user privacy, the documents showed.

The lawsuit was filed by a now defunct startup called Six4Three, which created a failed app called Pikinis.