14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook was aware of Russian entities collecting user data since at least October 2014 according to information obtained after the UK Parliament seized internal documents as reported by Bloomberg.
The info revealing Russian interference on the social network is from an email sent by a Facebook engineer which MP Damian Collins says was describing data harvesting behavior of multiple Russian organizations and individuals.
"An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day," Collins told BuzzFeed. "Now was that reported to any external body at the time?"
UK lawmakers obtained the email containing the incriminating evidence from Six4Three's founder Theodore Kramer who was pressured into giving over documents related to a lawsuit his company filed against Facebook.
Kramer later filed an account of what happened when the UK Parliament seized the court documents with the San Mateo County Superior Court which was subsequently obtained by both BuzzFeed and Ars Technica.
Facebook says the incriminating email was taken out of context
Although the email mentioning Russian intrusion makes it quite evident that the social network did know about the issue, however, Facebook told Bloomberg that "The engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity."
Furthermore, Richard Allan, Facebook policy solutions VP, refused to discuss any of the documents the UK Parliament managed to seize from Six4Three since Californian courts sealed them.
"There is, as I understand it, a partial set of information that was obtained by a hostile litigant who is repeatedly seeking to overturn actually the very changes to restrict access to data that you as a committee and others would want us to see happen," said Allan.
In addition, the Facebook executive also stated that "Any information that you have seen in that cache of emails is at best partial, and at worst potentially misleading."