One aspect of the long-running debate
about Facebook privacy may soon be
heading to court.
Two Facebook users, Michael Hurley and
Matthew Campbell, filed a class action
lawsuit against Facebook on Dec. 30, 2013,
alleging that the social network “has
systematically violated consumers’ privacy
by reading its users’ personal, private
Facebook messages without their consent.”
The lawsuit also alleges that when
Facebook finds a link in a private message,
it essentially clicks on the URL and if that
site has a Facebook “Like” button, the
inclusion of the URL in that message is
registered as a “Like” for that webpage.
The plaintiffs want Facebook to pay each
member of the class action lawsuit “$100 a
day for each day of violation or $10,000.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012
that Facebook was scanning private
messages and also registering “Likes” for
links in private messages. According to the
WSJ, Facebook said it filtered private
messages for spam or hints of criminal
activity, but also promised that “absolutely
no private information has been exposed.”
“The complaint is without merit and we
will defend ourselves vigorously,” a
Facebook spokesperson told the Huffington
Post.
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook, rather
than just filtering messages for spam,
mines them for data that it sells to
advertisers, marketers and other data-
miners. In 2011, the company made $2.7
billion in targeted ad sales, according to
the lawsuit.
Facebook is not the only company accused
of reading personal correspondence for
one reason or another. Google has also
been sued for reading Gmail users’ emails
without their consent.
Internet security expert Graham Cluley
argued recently that it’s in our best
interest for Facebook to scan our messages
. “[I]f you didn’t properly scan and check
links, there’s a very real risk that spam,
scams, phishing attacks, and malicious
URLs designed to infect recipients’
computers with malware could run rife,”
Cluley wrote.
