Ted Kramer seemed on edge. While sitting at a Starbucks store recently talking to a reporter, he kept looking over his shoulder mid-conversation, scanning people and cars passing by.
"It's like we are fishing in this tiny boat with no one else around and we somehow managed to hook a massive great white shark on our line," Kramer said in his first extensive public comments on the case, a lengthy emailed response to questions that were screened by his attorney. The emails were exchanged between meetings in San Francisco and Redwood City.
NBC News has not been able to determine whether the documents represent a complete picture. Facebook declined to provide additional evidence to support its view that they were cherry-picked. As a result of the lawsuit, Kramer fears becoming an outcast in Silicon Valley. But his goal has not changed: to put Facebook's entire business model on trial — particularly what he views as the company's bait-and-switch of offering Facebook user data to apps like Pikinis and then removing it.
From 2010 until April 30, 2015, the Graph API gave all Facebook apps access to a vast dataset of not only individual users, but their friends as well. This trove included private messages, check-ins, events, locations, relationships, and — crucially for Six4Three — photos. Among a long list of things that Six4Three has asked the court to impose is a restoration of the earlier version of the more permissive Graph API. That's something Facebook has vowed not to do.
Kramer returned home to New York in 2007 and soon began working as a teacher. He later joined his high school friend Thomas Scaramellino's energy software company, Efficiency 2.0. After the startup sold to a larger company, Kramer joined WeWork in 2013 and oversaw the rollout of its co-working spaces to new cities across the United States and Europe.
"Facebook continues to tell the court and the media that it shut down Six4Three because it was a sketchy app and wanted access to data that Facebook had locked down allegedly for privacy reasons," Kramer said."That is complete pablum. It's simply not what happened."