Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., listens during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, April 10, 2018.

Facebook formed special deals with select companies that granted them access to the data of users and their friends well past 2015, when the social media company said it cut off developer access to that information, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Referred to as "whitelists," the special agreements allowed companies to access information, like phone numbers of users' friends and degree of closeness between users, according to the Wall Street Journal.

These customized deals were mostly separate from the 60 or so deals Facebook revealed this week it had struck with device makers. Some major companies who received such deals include Nissan and RBC Capital Markets, as well as advertisers and Facebook partners that are valuable for other reasons.