Facebook sought to collect details of hundreds of millions of users’ phone calls and texts without permission as it feared that gathering the data openly would bring negative headlines.

Details of how Facebook engineers conceived a way to prevent a “permissions” screen from appearing in the apps of Android phone users are included in a 250-page cache of company emails published by MPs yesterday.

The internal emails, which reveal Mark Zuckerberg’s awareness that users’ data would be “leaked”, were first obtained in a legal process in the US by Six4Three, a company suing Facebook. Last month parliament seized the documents from an executive of the startup who was visiting London.

In one of the messages published by the digital, culture, media and sport select committee,