Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including personal health information. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook.

Internal emails also reveal plans by Facebook to pass data on single Facebook users to companies selling dating services or organisations that wanted to target single people with ‘political’ advertisements. The documents, marked confidential, reveal a secret programme by Facebook’s ‘Growth Team’ to collect and exploit data from customers with Android mobile phones. Their disclosures come only a week after a critical report by a UK parliamentary committee investigating disinformation and fake news, called for independent regulator to oversee Facebook and other social media companies.