In an unprecedented move Wednesday, British lawmakers published hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails and other documents that previously had been ordered sealed as part of an ongoing legal case between Facebook and a now-defunct app developer called Six4Three.

The documents, which date back to 2012, provide a rare window into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts on how to expand his social media juggernaut as users made the transition from desktop to mobile phones. They also suggest a willingness within Facebook to sacrifice user privacy and undercut its competitors to continue driving growth.

"I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important questions about how Facebook treats users' data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market," tweeted Damian Collins MP, who heads up Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee. The committee, which is conducting an investigation into Facebook privacy concerns, seized the documents from Six4Three's founder while he was traveling in London last month.

Facebook says the documents are “very misleading without additional context.” “Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “But the facts are clear: We've never sold people’s data.”

The documents were collected by Six4Three's legal team as part of the discovery process for a lawsuit that alleges Facebook defrauded app developers by luring them with the promise of data, only to later cut them off from that information. The unredacted exhibits posted by Collins on Wednesday include internal emails, presentations, and memos. In one email, Zuckerberg personally approves a decision to shut down API access to Vine, a video-based social network backed by Twitter, in January 2013. In another, Facebook executives discuss giving Android devices access to users' call logs without requiring their informed consent. Zuckerberg himself toys with the idea of trading app developer access to Facebook’s APIs for advertising revenue from those developers in 2012. That same year, he expresses openness to “locking down” developers’ access to their users’ friends data. Facebook wouldn’t actually announce that change for another two years, even as it built relationships with developers on the back of that data.

In 2012, Zuckerberg voices his skepticism in an email to Facebook’s then-director of product management, Sam Lessin, that sharing friend data with app developers might ever pose privacy risk. “I just can’t think if any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us," he writes. "Do you have examples of this?”

Six years later, amid ongoing global investigations into how an app developer working with the political firm Cambridge Analytica was able to weaponize data for political purposes, that question looks remarkably naive. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which made international headlines in March and elevated a global conversation about the need for stricter data privacy laws, also cast the lawsuit between Six4Three and Facebook in a new light. The case began in 2015, after Facebook changed its API to cut developers off from friend data. Six4Three’s app, Pikinis, used friend data to let users find people’s bathing suit photos. Without access to friend data, the Pikinis app shut down, and its founder Ted Kramer sued Facebook, asking the company to either reinstate access or pay damages.

But it's the documents that Six4Three unearthed through discovery that have become the focal point of the case. Though they were ordered sealed earlier this year by a US court, UK lawmakers repeatedly ordered Kramer to hand them over while he was in London. Kramer, who had illicit access to the documents through a Dropbox folder that was supposed to be limited to his legal team, later told the court he “panicked” and handed over what he could to Collins and his staff. Facebook is now asking the California court to reopen the discovery process into Six4Three. Kramer and his legal team have been ordered to hand over their laptops and other devices for forensic investigation.