Facebook has been accused of intercepting private messages of its users
to provide data to marketers, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a
federal court in California.
The social networking company scanned plaintiffs' private messages
containing URLs (uniform resource locators) and searched the website identified
in the URL for "purposes including but not limited to data mining and user
profiling," according to the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of California.
The company does not engage in the practice to facilitate the
transmission of users' communications via Facebook, but to enable it to mine
user data and profit by sharing the data with third parties such as
advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators, the complaint said.
Facebook is said to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act and California privacy laws by its intentional interception of electronic
communications.
The complaint cites third-party research to back its claim that Facebook
is intercepting and scanning the content of private messages. Swiss firm
High-Tech Bridge, for example, reported in August it used a dedicated Web server and
generated a secret URL for each of the 50 largest social networks, Web services
and free email systems it was testing for their respect of user privacy.
HTB then used the private messaging function of each of the services,
embedding a unique URL in each message, and monitored its dedicated Web
server's logs for all incoming HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests, in
order to see whether any of the services would "click" on the test
URLs that had been transmitted via private message, the complaint said.
"Facebook was one of the Web Services that was caught scanning URLs
despite such activity remaining undisclosed to the user," according to the
complaint.
The lawsuit has been brought by Facebook users Matthew Campbell and
Michael Hurley on behalf of all Facebook users in the U.S. who have sent or
received private Facebook messages that included a URL in the content of the
message.
On Nov. 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new, integrated email and messaging
service for its users that combined the functionality of email, chat, SMS, and
in- service messaging. Facebook took special pains to tout the privacy features
of its new private messaging service, stressing unprecedented user control and
privacy, according to the complaint.
In its communications about the service, the social network is said to
have made representations that "reflect the promise that only the sender
and the recipient or recipients will be privy to the private message's content,
to the exclusion of any other party, including Facebook."
The lawsuit asks for class-action status, an injunction against
Facebook's practices and damages from the company to class members. It claims
the greater of either US$100 a day for each day of alleged violation or
$10,000, for each user claimed to be affected, besides damages under California
law.
"We believe the allegations are without merit and we will defend
ourselves vigorously," Facebook said in an emailed statement.
In our opinion, fb serves more profitably than whatever demerit this lawsuit may be throwing up; even if the giant social media network will be cautioned it should by no means hamper the operation.
