During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. 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.
Details about the attorneys’ comments come from The Verge’s Lauren Feiner, who is currently in the courtroom where proceedings are taking place today. Apple, Google, and Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Snap declined to comment.
Snap’s attorney maligned Meta’s “cavalier approach and casual disregard” of other companies swept into the case, and wondered if “Meta would have applied meaningful redactions if it were its own information that was at stake.” Meta attorney Mark Hansen suggested using a third party that’s not involved in the trial team to work on redactions.
Even prior to the discovery of the redactions issue, Snap had been upset about what it called confidential information being shared during opening statements. (The company didn’t specify precisely which information it considered confidential.) Hansen said yesterday that he didn’t believe he revealed anything confidential in the company’s opening statements, an assessment Snap’s attorney disagreed with.
As for why Meta didn’t let Snap know it would be including the information, Hansen said that he didn’t want to give the company a heads up about what it’s presenting at trial because “very clearly, Snap is working with the FTC. Snap is a major competitor.”
Though clearly redacted for a reason, as they shared information from inside other companies that wasn’t intended for public viewing, the unredacted documents didn’t reveal particularly juicy information. One segment mentioned that iPhone users tend to prefer Apple’s own Messages app to those of Meta and Snap, while another slide, labeled “Snapchat in 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps,” noted that its competitors, including Meta’s apps and TikTok, were “thriving.”
To Snap and the other companies, how juicy the details were isn’t the point. Snap’s attorney accused Meta’s lead attorney of openly referencing Snap’s competitive assessments that should have been private.
