Senior British MPs have alleged that Facebook entered deals with some technology companies to ensure they had full access to users' friends data on the platform.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has published a trove of documents from the social network company - including emails from senior executives.

Committee chair Damian Collins argued there is 'considerable public interest' in releasing the documents.

He said: "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."

We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents.

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) December 5, 2018

In a summary, Mr Collins claimed Facebook entered into 'whitelisting agreements' with a number of companies, which meant that "after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data."

Emails released suggest that companies such as Netflix, AirBnB and taxi app Lyft were among the firms which benefited from such deals.

It is also alleged that the Facebook 'targeted competitor apps' - taking aggressive positions and denying them access to data.

One email chain included suggests that Facebook shut down friends data access for Twitter's Vine video service.

The company is also accused of using an Israeli data firm called Onavo "to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, and apparently without their knowledge".

In a statement quoted by The New York Times, Facebook said the documents represent "only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context."

The statement added: "Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform. But the facts are clear: we've never sold people's data."

A number of parliamentary groups around the world have been investigating Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.