Lawyers representing Apple said the company may not be able to trust Meta, after the social network company leaked internal data shared with the company in confidence.

Amusingly, Meta didn’t share the data deliberately, but instead used a method of redacting a PDF which is well-known for being trivial to undo …

Meta has been taken to court by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged antitrust violations. Specifically, the company is accused of trying to create an illegal monopoly in consumer social networking by buying up Facebook competitor Instagram, as well as messaging app WhatsApp.

This is the second round in a case which was first brought back in 2020. Meta succeeded then in having the case dismissed, but the judge did allow the FTC to provide more detailed arguments on why it thinks a monopoly was created by the acquisitions. The commission did so, and a new trial is underway.

If Meta loses the case, it could be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

One of Meta’s defences is that Apple’s Messages app is more popular than each of Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. It argued that you can’t separate social network messaging apps from more general ones like iMessage, given the ways in which consumers use them.

As part of making this case, Meta showed redacted slides in which the actual percentage usage was hidden. However, The Verge quickly discovered that these redactions had been made simply by applying solid black boxes as a layer in the PDF, and this layer could be trivially removed to reveal the underlying content. This is a very well-known flawed method of redacting PDFs.

Lawyers representing Apple were among those to comment on the “egregious” error.

Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors “egregious,” with Apple’s representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with its internal information in the future. Google’s attorney also blamed Meta for jeopardizing the search giant’s data with the mistake.

The data revealed wasn’t especially interesting – it only showed that 88% of US iPhone owners had used the Messages app within the past week. While Apple has never revealed this percentage, any of us would have guessed that usage was extremely high.

The utter incompetence of the redaction has led some to suggest it was deliberate, but personally I suspect Hanlon’s Razor applies: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

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Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash